Implementing A Position Based Cloth Solver From Scratch

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Position Based Dynamic effects are quite popular today as these provide us with fast, predictable and stable simulations. Houdini comes with PBDs packaged inside of the “Grains” node and with H17 with XPBD inside of the vellum solver. This video shows how to implement one of the ancestors of the PBD technique. The idea comes from an aritcle on gamasutra called Advanced Character Physics
By implementing this Verlet based cloth solver we gain quite some insight in the principles behind Position Based Dynamics.

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1 Comment so far

  1. Hello,

    Some very interesting stuff, thank you for this!

    One thing I picked up not too long ago is that you can plug the Input_1 node to the Prev_Frame input and remove the switch. It should behave exactly the same 🙂

    Cheers

  2. philip pappas

    Thank you for the tutorial! really helpfull. i have a question though as i am trying to implement this to my project.
    What happens if my force/forces should update dynamically? for example if i wanted the cloth to keep a certain distance from obstacles and each frame i created a force pointing away from the obstacle depending on a minimum distance threshold.
    Currently the forces are outside the for loop isnt that a problem? while its doing 50 iterations its not taking into account any changes in forces, perhaps as its satisfying the constraints the distances of my cloth to the obstacle objects is also changing

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