first of all - thank you for your replies.


yes, interacting is the keypoint. goal is this: a ground covered with random sized stones. then a caterpillar will drive through the scene in circles and will leave tracks from its chains. I allready thought about to paint it in ZB but i am bad at painting, that´s the point. the scene is taken then for a realtime renderer and I´d like to use as much geometry as possible for the performance or just bake out a lower res geometry and hiRes normalmap. but since I need to achieve as much "photorealism" as possible for the final result I think it would be the best to simulate the whole stuff with real chains moving through real stones and get a natural result.

I allready tested a softbody simulation with a 200x200 nurbspatch and a ball rolling over it. allthough the resolution could be much more for my needs the calculating times are allready incredibly high. I could let it render over night but I fear that memory issues will arise.

I guess the particle instancer will be the next way to go.