What a way to start the day!
I’ve really wanted to do a blender animation for a while so I decided to give it a go and went for some coffee beans!
The first step was to create a little coffee bean model which I did by editing a sphere down to the rough shape, sculpting in a crease and then converting it into a VDB and then back to a polygon to smooth out the surface. I gave it a suitable brown colour using Redshift shaders and applied a rough displacement to bump up the surface a bit.
For the simulation I stacked thousands of the beans (11,100) in a tower and dropped them into a blender I had modelled. I used a vortex force within the blender to make them orbit and collide with the edges.
By tweaking the attributes on the orbit force I was able to get some of the beans to shoot out of the top of the blender for a cool dynamic shot!
I used redshift proxy files in order to make the render very fast, rather than having to load in 11,100 beans every frame it’s just the one that is copied onto every point. By creating a very low res version of the bean by reducing the polygons on the original model by over 90% I could use this proxy for the actual simulation and just replace them with the high resolution geometry for the final render. The entire 5 second simulation took under 25 minutes to complete.
As always, a tidy scene file, is a happy scene file!