How to get particles to avoid each other

Support Particles and Physics Simulations
1

Hi guys,

I am trying to get particles to avoid each other but haven’t been able. Basically I want them to behave as rigid bodies. I also want to restrict their overall positions to a random distribution on another mesh. I have tried different physics options for the particle system but this is my first time attempting to do something like this and I haven’t gotten a hang for all the options provided in each particle physics type. I found some info online stating that Boids would be the way to go and so I tried setting it up but the results aren’t good. I have ‘Separate’ and ‘Avoid collision’ enabled as rules for the BoidBrain but my particles are still intersecting.

If anyone has a better approach please share.

Attached is an image of what I have so far. Basically I have a mesh that spells out the word ‘Coffee’ and it has a Particle System on it. The particles are set to ‘Object’ and the chosen object is another mesh that has been modelled into a coffee bean.

Thanks

boids-coffee-beans.jpg2300×1294 217 KB

2

Boids would of been my best guess

3

I’m trying a different method and have gotten better results. I’m following this: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/76614/fill-particles-in-a-container/84323

Any other way of doing this will be greatly appreciated. Thx!

4

Making particles collide in this way can be done with the Molecular add-on. But it assumes that particles are spheres.

If you want the sim to take the actual geometry of your beans into account, I don’t see a way around rigid body sim. is the image above showing the actual problem? With this number of objects it should work well enough. Use Convex Hull for collisions.