Is there a way to make particles behave like rigid body objects? I want to create a scene that has a lot of irregularly shaped objects piled up on the ground.  I don't want the objects to intersect with eachother.

I started off by creating a particle system that uses an object group containing these objects.  No matter what settings I 'messed with' I could not get the individual objects to behave the way I want them to - They would interact with the ground like perfect spheres, and they would pass through the other particle objects.

Is there a way to make particles have rigid body physics so they behave with each other and with the ground like real objects?

Or failing that - is there a way to copy rigid body attributes to many objects? (i.e. plan be - don't use a particle system, but rather make lots and lots of copies of the objects and just let them fall)

Edit:  I ended up applying the settings 26 times (there are 26 unique objects) and then copying those 26 objects several times. To produce this



but this was before there were any replies to this question. Thanks to WChargin's answer I will be able to copy the attibutes in one action next time I do something like this :)
[Is] there a way to copy rigid body attributes to many objects?


Copy Rigid Body Settings sounds like it might do the trick. Select all the objects, then select the one with the correct settings last (make it the active object). Then, press Space> Copy Rigid Body Settings, or select Copy from Others from the Object Mode toolbox under Rigid Body Tools.



EDIT: You can also use the Copy to Selected function of the right-click menu to copy any property from the active object to all selected objects; for example:





To do it natively: if there is a way, I can't find it. I've tried Particle Instance modifier with rigid body instances, Size Deflect option, duplication, hooks&hellip; nada. Do post if you find a &ldquo;cleaner&rdquo; way to do it.