GroundFX is a Blender addon for ground that remembers what walked on it. one click gives you a deformable layer of sand, snow or mud; mark the objects that should touch it and they leave tracks, push material aside, pile it up in front of them and let it trickle back down behind.
what it is for
- motion: something drives or walks through the material and you want continuous, believable tracks at an interactive framerate.
- stills: an object falls into sand or snow, the surface settles, and you render a high resolution hero shot with a crisp silhouette and a proper thrown-up ridge around it.
those two want opposite things, so there is a switch. the photo workflow raises the quality profile, increases substeps for a clean entry, renders with real displacement, and freezes the surface once it comes to rest.
how it works
underneath is a heightfield solver: the material is a surface with a height at every point rather than millions of individual grains. that is what makes it fast enough to scrub the timeline, and it covers the effects that actually matter: tracks, displacement, piling, the angle of repose, a bow wave in the direction of travel, material settling back. a light spray layer sits on top for the dust and the flying grains.
what it deliberately does not do: bury an object completely, build overhangs, or throw chunks across the room. that needs a different kind of solver, and pretending otherwise would only make this one worse at what it is good at.
built to bake
the whole simulation runs in geometry nodes with no python in the frame loop, so it bakes and renders like any other Blender simulation instead of falling apart on the render farm. sand, snow and mud each come with their own material and their own physical characteristics, and quality profiles run from a realtime preview up to the settings you want for a final frame.
the solver, the collision handling and the materials are in place; the workflow tools are being finished.
in developmentlicence
GroundFX is released under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0. private, academic and non-profit use is free, including changes and passing it on, as long as the licence and the copyright notice travel with it. commercial use or distribution needs an agreement first: licence, commercial terms, [email protected].
privacy
GroundFX collects no user data. read the full privacy policy.