I’ve spent a fair amount of time playing around with Houdini now and it made me a little curious about how Blender simulations work and compare with it. I bought a couple of Udemy courses from Stephen Pearson and I think he did a decent job at giving a fair overview.
I decided to take a few different types of simulations I’d seen and put them into a single animation, and this video below is the result:
My first render attempt was at 1080p with only 128 samples with the NLM denoiser. I wasn’t happy with the result though, in an example frame below you can clearly see a lot of noise below the platform.
This first 1080p render was actually using CPU rendering, as my GPU seemed to hang on some tiles in the first part of the scene with the particle effects. This meant some frames that the CPU can render in 40 seconds would take 4 minutes on the GPU. Since the renders were too grainy, I decided to re-render everything again whilst reducing the resolution to 720p. I also switched the denoiser to Open Image Denoise which I think looks a little bit better than NLM, and increasing the samples to 512 seemed enough to give a clean result.
Making simulations with Blender is much easier than Houdini, although I did have a few crashes and problems at different points and it took a while to get everything working more or less as I’d like. I don’t think I’ll bother experimenting much more with Blender simulations going forward though, I think it will be more beneficial for me to stick with Houdini.
I’ve only made two posts in 2021 which is a bit disappointing, but that isn’t because I’ve stopped doing any more learning. The main cause was the birth of my second child which has kept me VERY busy, so there are only so many hours I can find in a day to work on things like this. He’s worth it though! :)
Next up I’m planning to do some more modelling in Blender because it’s been a little while and I’m out of practice. I’ve watched a lot of videos about building environments too (particularly with the new UE5) so I might have a go at making something else like that myself too.
