Has anyone done a comparison with Houdini muscle system and Ziva? http://zivadynamics.com/ [zivadynamics.com]

Ziva *looks* to have very fast tet solving but not sure how it really compares in production.

Thx!

https://vimeo.com/186492355 [vimeo.com]

Yes, Ziva FEM is very fast indeed.

My hope is H17 brings an comparable/faster FEM solver, because Houdini is much, much more flexible.

Actually i'm working with FEM/Muscle in a custom setups, and doing some things not possible in Ziva.. but it is not “fast” in any means…

soon i will post some R&Ds on this.

Ziva looks way better, than houdini FEM in muscle system(saying this with tears in my eyes). I try to setup horse muscle system for about half a year. Other guy setup Ziva muscles for about 2 weeks(!) and all the muscles(75) solves faster then one houdini muscle.
Is it some magic in Ziva solver?
Seems I will stop my research and muscles setup in houdini, cause for now muscle system is not suitable for realistic creatures setup in reasonable amount of time.

Rod TD
My hope is H17 brings an comparable/faster FEM solver, because Houdini is much, much more flexible.

This is my hopes too.

The natural progression for FEM/muscles will be XPBD based FEM in
https://youtu.be/rm26NF9f4aA?t=60 [youtu.be]

Ziva FEM solver is specifically designed for muscle simulation which enables many optimizations. Main challange for the solver in case of muscles is interpenetration and collision between muscles, and in fact this is the slowest part of Houdini FEM. We run sims with 50+ muscles in minutes without piecewise collisions. I can't really complain. Typical scenario is using SDF approximation of muscles for fast collisions with a very little lost of accuracy in terms of volume preservation. Houdini, being general FEM solver, doesn't do that (it's a pity FEM solver does't allow micro solvers for custom collision handling, but this might be technically tricky as I presume since collision response has to be efficiently injected into finite elements matrix).

Personally I don't see big advantage of Ziva over Houdini muscles. And as always, Houdini flexibility will be huge win for any advanced system. Do any complicated character with skin, mixed muscles with linear skinning, post process corrections and blend shapes, and you will see the difference.

And yes, Vellum (XPBD) is a new chapter for muscles in Houdini.

The default Ziva tetra cage is very low-res compared to Houdini in general, at least as a default. When XPDB FEM is released it would be good to base the default cage settings on Ziva at least!