How to displace pebbles in bowl?

I’m trying to think of a variety of ways to accomplish this but I don’t know Blender well enough yet to really come up with any solution.

I have a bowl of small pebbles. Each pebble is it’s own mesh object. I’m trying to figure out, when inserting another object (like a stick) into the bowl, how to get the pebbles to realistically displace themselves in reaction to the inserted object. In other words, when the object is inserted it now occupies the space where the pebbles were so the pebbles have to move somewhere else.

In my mind, I would think that the pebbles would collectively act like a liquid but I don’t know how that would be applied.

Thanks!

You can use rigid bodies for the pebbles and animate the stick moving through them. See example blend file (Alt+A to play animation)


Rigid bodies http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.66/Rigid_Body_Simulation
Look on youtube for examples

Attachments

rigid_body.blend (2.81 MB)

I had tried that without success but now I know where I went wrong after viewing your blend file. Thank you so much for your help!