This is the best dry stone wall digital model I’ve made so far. It mimics a real dry stone wall which is effectively two retaining walls leaning in on each other.
In a simulated physics test the wall was subject to an impact and you can see in the video (http://youtu.be/i4libtFl_KA) how very little of the impact energy was transmitted along the wall. Only that part of the wall which was directly impacted was damaged.
There’s also a simulation of the wall being destroyed by an earthquake here http://youtu.be/cnx5BoF_Sd4 although this simulation probably doesn’t mimic a real wall under earthquake conditions because the ground movement has not been made to match a real earthquake and the wall doesn’t contain through stones and hearting which would act to dampen the effect of vibration forces. Physics simulation was done in Sketchup using the Sketchyphysics plugin.
Each side of the wall consists of prism-shaped rocks packed according to Rocksolver’s 2D packing algorithm. Have a look at my previous post about how 3D structures like dry stone walls are built by solving a 2D packing problem.
If you’d like a copy of the digital 3D model of this dry stone wall then sign up here http://first-rocksolver-customer.kickoffpages.com/, be a beta tester and I’ll email you the file, for free. Or you can buy it for $20 here http://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/architectural-exterior/landmark/dry-stone-wall–2.
Rocksolver 