Sand simulations

In Bones of Essimer we have a scene where the Bone Ship travels over the desert.  About a month ago I began to research sand simulations.

I found that tutorials on sand simulations weren't exactly easy to find.  I knew that a sand simulation would need to use a particle system, and that the software RealFlow might be useful for this. 

One of the tutorials I found was an underwater sand tutorial for Maya.  I haven't had a chance to test it out yet, but we maybe able to adapt some of the techniques to our project




Another that I looked at was a Realflow and Maya integration tutorial from Digital Tutors.  It created a basic sandman effect by using particles in realflow to fill a geometry imported from Maya.  The particles were then taken back to Maya, duplicated and then assigned a script to cause colour variation to emulate sand.  As we are now starting to work with Realflow I may try this out.  

I also came across some articles that talked about using Houdini for sand, saying that it had a hidden tool for this.  I've never used Houdini but the computers at SIT did have this software so it may be worth a look.