Emitter
 

I'm looking for a tutorial or help in finding out how to continuously create lots of the same shapes through emitters or some other way.

I want to make a massive plane and keep spilling spheres onto it.

If you just want spheres you can use the sphere particle type , or if you want it to emit models instead, you can use the instancer replacement thingy.

GecT is correct.

Create an emitter, set your particle render type to "Sphere", and set the rate to the default 100 to test with.

Select the particleShape, then shift-select the plane, and go to Particles > Make Collide.

Select the particleShape, and apply a gravity field.

Basicly, that should do it.

See my attached Maya 8.5 demo scene to see the tweaks I made to things such as spread, direction, GeoConnector resilience (bouncyness), friction, etc.

Learn from it, and check the help for more details regarding specific terms and functions:)

Good luck!

Here is an image of the result of the above Maya file:)