The secret cookie burial ground

[Thomas M.]

Well, that's more or less what I have to model. Several thousand cookie like objects which lie on top of each other on a big pile. It has to look kind of wild and I don't want them to be piled on stacks. And now the big mistery: How can I place them in an automatic way without having the objects intersect with each other afterwards?
I'm not really new to Lightwave (definetly not!) but some tasks seem to be a bit to hard for me.
I'm using standard Lightwave 7.5 without Napalm or any other third party particle plug in.
As I get quite close to this structure I can't cheat with a bump map in the foreground. The objects will be simple discs with some depth to them and I need approx. 5000-10000 of them.
If there's some kind creature out there with some help, I promise to sacrifice sweets to the cookie gods till the end of time (if I manage not to eat them myself before).

Thanks so far in advance
Thomas

[HowardM]

Well, if youre patient, you could use Motion Designer, tweaked for hardbodies, and just drop all the cookies and let them fall....

[Thomas M.]

Can you give me a few clues how to do that? The idea to drop them occured to me too, but last time I used MD to drop a piece of cloth on the ground it never stopped to hover over the ground. Don't I need also this kind of PS Pro plug-in to let objects be dropped via particles? (And how to tweak MD for hard-body dynamics?)

Propositions are welcome!
Thomas

[HowardM]

Search here, Cgtalk, and the original NT forum (as well as NTs tutorials page) for Motion Designer, MD, Hardbodies...read up, and youll quickly learn how to use MD for things other than cloth!

Once youve played with the tutorials, youll understand how to easily make your cookies!

But since the world is going to hell and everyone needs to be hand fed (myself included) heres a quickie!

Make a subdivided cookie, and a subd floor. Load into Layout. Turn on MD and activate both objects, turn on Target for both. Make the floor Fixed. Use extremely large SPRING and HOLD values for the cookie. Set some Gravity...
Move the cookie above the floor and make a keyframe.
Hit MD Start and watch as your cookie falls and bounces....hopefully...you may have to start tweaking and testing from here on...
once youve got a nice bounce either make alot of clones or I think you could easily make a ton of cookies in modeller and just let them all drop...
you have to play, play, play! but isnt it fun?
:)

OR

you could use FXlinker, a Collision floor and a cookie...but then you wont get realistic collisions...a little easier to do but wont look as good.