Suggestions on how to create an accumulating sand animation?

Hello. Infrequent user trying to figure out how to show/animate falling sand that accumulates. I’ll then animate that layer being ‘swept’ off. I have a bit of experience with Fredo 6 Animator but can’t quite figure it out. I’ve tried sandboxing a layer to create a wavy surface and then using the DropGC extension but ran into a roadblock. Any suggestions? Thanks

make a sandpile below the surface and raise it…

the falling sand can be a separate comp that rotates…
it’s a bit like this principle…


john

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A year or so ago I used the MSPhysics extension to simulate about 5000 little dodecahedrons (or similar simple regular shape, I don’t recall exactly) that filled a box, and then a shovel-like object was dragged through them to create a trench. The purpose was to approximate how soil would respond, where the “soil particles” were represented by those ~5000 blobs, each about a quarter of an inch in diameter (way over-scale). The box container was just to prevent the “soil particles” from dispersing due to gravity. I did not want to hand-animate the behavior, so the physics simulation provided by MSPhysics was very helpful.

Perhaps you could use MSPhysics (find it on SketchUcation) to simulate the behavior of the sand particles, both when streaming onto a surface and being swept away. MSPhysics has a feature where a steady drip of a series of objects can be easily created. I don’t recall the terminology in the program, but there is a way to automatically spawn new instances of a given object into the simulation - such as grains of sand.

In case it helps to explain my usage, I captured an animation of the resultant simulation as part of a video dedicated to an on-going SketchUp modeling project I’m doing. Here is a link to the video, at about 13:47 into it, where the scene with the trenching animation occurs. If the link doesn’t automatically jump to about the 13:47 point, use the YouTube scrubber bar to scroll over manually.

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Thanks TDahl! Reminded me that I have MSPhysics, which I’ve only played around with for 10 minutes. I’ll look into the tutorials and give that a shot. And awesome model and animation btw!

Thanks for replying John! Think I’m gonna try TDahls suggestion.