Full Tutorial - Sand Crawl with MPM Let’s take a deep look at the new Sand tools inside Houdini’s MPM solver. Effects that once demanded complex setups and heavy custom logic are now dramatically faster to build, debug, and art-direct. With the new pre-built sand framework, creating highly believable granular motion has become not only more accessible, but genuinely fun to experiment with.
In this breakdown, I’ll walk through my understanding of how the core MPM sand configuration works under the hood, and how we can push it further by modifying key parameters and layering custom behavior. We’ll explore ways to reshape the base system into something more expressive, more stylized, or more physically grounded depending on the look you’re after.
To finish, I’ll cover a set of rendering techniques that enhance breakup, depth, and micro-detail—approaches that help sand read as tactile, heavy, and natural under real-world lighting.
