Sand Advection - Unfettered Design

Thanks to Bob Warmsley of Insydium for the main technique behind this one. The main idea is to use an explosia effect to advect the particles that are emitted into the volume of the logo. The emitter is set to hexagonal and is a single shot. The number of particles is determined by the radius of the particles. I set the radius to .2cm so there would be enough particles to look like grains.

The whole sim took just over two hours to cache. After it finishing caching everything was working as expected until, for no apparent reason, the cache object on the sand particle emittor turned green as if it had no cache data. After an hour or two of googling around and messing around with cache folder names etc, I realised I had renamed the xpemitter to xpemitter_sand AFTER I had cached evrything. It turns out that the object name is tied to the folder name where the cache files are stored! I just renamed it back and it found the cache files. I was nearly resigned to the fact I had to resim which would have been quicker but I would not have learnt from my mistake.

The grains are created by adding a Redshift object to the emitter and using custom objects to replace the particles. I used 6 or 7 low poly spheres with different materials to get the look I was after.

The environment is a simple landscape object. I used a matrix object with a redshift object attached to it to scatter a few grass objects around the scene.