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Worm locomotion with FEM

I have always wanted to do a dynamic locomotion setup, I have tried in the past with wire and sop solver with .... interesting results ;)

With FEM in Houdini 13, the rest attribute is stored on vertices which allows a tetra to change its rest state independently of the surrounding tetras. With this, parts can be expanded and shrunk to get a muscle type action.

I have started with a worm since it is quite simple, the contractions and expansions move back along the worm in a wave, opposing the travel direction. It took quite a bit of tweaking to get him moving at all. One major element of a real worm's action that's missing is the little hairs that grip the ground. I couldn't find a way to change the friction per point so I have gone a bit hacky and multed down v wherever I didn't want the worm to move. I would love to hear if there is a per point friction control!

Here is the video

Houdini 13 FEM Worm locomotion from Sam Hancock on Vimeo.

...and the .hip is here

H15 .hip here, for some reason, setting the rest attribute in the SOP solver no longer worked, I just turned on the rest geo option on the object and bypassed it in the SOP solver ... ?

Comments

  1. UnknownFebruary 13, 2014 at 6:18 AM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownApril 24, 2014 at 3:21 PM

    Godlike!

    ReplyDelete
  3. smurphyJune 9, 2014 at 8:47 AM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  4. UnknownJune 10, 2014 at 2:28 AM

    Hi, Sam!
    Can I setup dynamic locomotion in Houdini 12.5?
    Goodlike!
    alexparfin@gmail.com

    ReplyDelete
  5. hughspeersJune 12, 2014 at 1:18 AM

    this is amazing, nice work , Are you going to do a worm form dune next ? :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. SamJune 18, 2014 at 9:47 PM

    A sand solver sounds like a can of worms ;)

    ReplyDelete
  7. UnknownJuly 12, 2014 at 5:28 PM

    your .hip files are awesome!! thanks for sharing!!

    ReplyDelete
  8. عماد قاسمیAugust 18, 2014 at 1:47 AM

    Oh my god The hip file , It's awesome, thanks for sharing ♥

    ReplyDelete
  9. UnknownSeptember 12, 2015 at 7:30 AM

    Hi Sam, this is really good! And thanks for the super hip, really usefull. Just one question ... can you (or sombody) confirm it wors on H14? I cached the geo, but simply it doesn't works as it's supposed to do.
    Cheers!

    Marco

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. SamNovember 5, 2015 at 9:21 PM

      Sorry this is so late ... not sure what changed but I updated the file for H15, link above...

      Delete
  10. joeFebruary 25, 2020 at 1:38 PM

    Hi Sam! This is fantastic. Was wondering if there's a better way to do this for Houdini 17+
    I can't seem to get any movement with the H15 hip file.

    ReplyDelete

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