HurricaneTutorial 01
Cloth and Water Simulation in Blender: First Steps
Master the basic workflow of the DDR/XPBD simulator in Blender.
Introduction to Hurricane
Welcome to Hurricane! Hurricane is an advanced physics simulation engine integrated directly into Blender, designed to unify fluid calculations (using DDR) and position-based dynamics for cloth, softbodies, sand, and snow (using XPBD) into a single highly optimized system. This web portal contains a detailed written explanation of the tutorials and your reference manual throughout your learning journey.
In this first tutorial, we will take our first steps by establishing the general foundations of Hurricane. You will learn the standard workflow and see how it is possible to mix and interact fluid and cloth simultaneously within the same simulation, using specific tools like vertex Pinning or Deformable Surface interaction.
Since this is your first contact with Hurricane, we will explore the incredible potential of the Solver: a unified environment where you can seamlessly mix and interact multiple types of physics in a single simulation.
Step by step
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First, click Start a new Simulation in the Hurricane panel. This will enable all settings and spawn a default collider floor; you can hide its visibility in the Collider module for a cleaner workspace. Next, add a plane, subdivide it 40 times, and choose the Cloth preset. Since everything in Hurricane is calculated via particles, the recommended workflow is to design with particles first and enable meshing (via the Surface tab) at the end to save performance. However, for lightweight meshes like cloth or softbodies, it is completely possible to enable it from the start and it won't cause any performance issues, giving you better visual feedback (remember to click the refresh button if you need to force particle data updates onto the mesh). To pin the cloth, enter edit mode (temporarily turn off Geometry Nodes visibility in the Emitter List to see the original mesh), select the top vertices, go to the Pin panel, and click Per Island. This generates individual Empties that act as independent controllers to move or animate the cloth.
Simulation Tip: Viewport Cache & Clear Cache
In Hurricane, everything you play in the viewport is automatically stored in the physical cache. If you make direct visual adjustments (like dragging or moving the cloth anchoring Empties), the new behavior won't compute correctly on new frames until you empty the cache using the Clear Cache button. Make sure to use it whenever you want to wipe simulation memory before re-simulating!
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Create the emitter directly using the Add Emitter -> Sphere Volume tool and position it above the cloth. In Hurricane, each emitter has its own solver settings: verify how the fluid emitter works under the DDR solver, while the cloth uses the PBD-MultiStep solver.
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By default, because the solver sees individual particles rather than a continuous physical mesh, the smaller water particles slip through the spaces between the cloth particles. To fix this, expand the global Deformable Surface panel and enable Surface collision to reconstruct a continuous barrier from the coordinates of the cloth particles. If minor leaking occurs, balance the mass: decrease the fluid emitter mass to 0.5 and increase the cloth emitter mass to 5. Keep in mind that altering masses can directly affect solver constraints; stay alert to visual behaviors to achieve a perfect physical balance.
PBD Physics: Why Mass Balancing Matters
Under the PBD framework, position corrections after collision are distributed in inverse proportion to individual masses (1/m). If the fluid particles are too heavy compared to the cloth vertices, the solver corrects the cloth positions rather than the fluid, causing massive leaks. In this specific scene, reducing the fluid's mass to 0.5 and raising the cloth's mass to 5 is the combination that keeps the collisions stable.
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Go to the Surface section in the Hurricane panel. In the mesh type dropdown, select Cloth and check your cloth emitter to generate its mesh. Then, open the menu again and choose Liquid; in the emitter list, uncheck the cloth emitter to leave only the fluid volume active, generating a clean liquid mesh.
Deep Dive Into Tools
Vertex pinning, internal cloth constraints, and surface interaction are introduced here as a primer. In the upcoming lessons of this content, we will analyze the physics and optimizations of each option in detail.