Making sand in a sandbox and interacting with it?

greetings to all Blenderartists,

I haven´t found anything this specific on the topic on the forums or even on the web but I was wondering if anyone could give me some pointers on how I could go about creating sand to reside inside a sandbox and be able to create interaction with by means of an object. In this case, I want to create a small animation where a hand would push sand to reveal an object.

I´ve created a simple box , seen below (tried to simulate a toon shader btw) and I would like to fill it with sand and then show how a sandbox should be used.


any pointers would be much appreciated.
thanks.

I can’t say that I have any professional input, but in personal experience, I have used a Molecular plug-in for that sort of stuff. It’s a particle simulation usually used for sand.

Molecular script download:

I´ve installed it and started reading about it but so far I haven´t discovered a way to have the other object manipulate the particle system (sand), thought there is an example of two particle systems interacting with each other using this script. thanks!

That’s the easy part, just set the object as a collider and animate its movement.