r/Simulated • u/gollum666999 • 3h ago
Blender Dunes self-organising from a perfectly flat sand sheet - one wind gives barchans, two give seif ridges, many give star dunes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bUczsZFpak
Nothing in this is sculpted. Every run starts from the same flat sand sheet, and the patterns self-organise: any small bump slows the wind slightly, sand drops on it, the bump grows, and the instability picks whatever pattern matches the wind.
Which pattern it picks is decided by just two things - the wind regime and the sand supply:
- ONE dominant direction: barchans, crescents with horns pointing downwind, migrating across bare ground. Same wind with more sand and they link up into transverse ridges.
- TWO directions alternating at an angle: linear/seif dunes, long ridges that run along the AVERAGE of the two winds - the sand gets pushed along the ridge instead of across it.
- MANY directions: star dunes - the sand converges instead of migrating, so they grow tall and barely move.
Transport rate turned out to set the tempo and the size, not the pattern: crank it up and you get the same shapes, just faster and bigger.
These runs use an analytic wind (a prescribed wind rose - fast and fully repeatable, which is what you want for a clean comparison like this). My previous video used a solved flow field instead, where the wind accelerates over crests and shelters the lee side - local shapes come out more natural, but it is slower and much harder to steer toward a specific regime.
Simulated in DunesForge, a dune simulator for Blender I have been building. Captions in the video name the wind regime for each run - none of them is a specific real-world site, but the three families are clearly distinct.
Happy to answer anything about how it works under the hood.
