How to accomplish realistic piles of dirt in Blender? Got a question about how to accomplish realistic piles of dirt in Blender. Look at the design sketch below. See the dirt falling from between the cracks of the fingers?
I remember seeing this add-on a year or so ago but I forgot the name and couldn't figure out the right keywords to search. It did something like randomly drop particles where you wanted them. In the demo they were dropping fruit in a bowl I believe.
My main questions.

How should I approach the piles of dirt? I tried experimenting with a particle system and couldn't get the piling up effect. Should it just be one object with a dirt material? It needs to be quite realistic for my client.

Same question with the dirt in the hand. I imagine it could just be a textured object but I'm worried it will look bad towards the bottom as it becomes falling particles. However if I fill the hand with particles that's a LOT of data.


I think you get the point. I need help wrapping my head around how to best approach the dirt in this design where realism is the goal. Thank you!
The addon you are talking about is probably Molecular (Sand sim with Molecular)
Simulating everything will take a beefy PC and huge amounts of simulation time, and will only look good if you got the settings right before hand, but if you do its very rewarding.
You maybe want to look into techniques like
Particle Dirt

Particle Dirt

Displacement and bump mapping with PBR textures

Displacement and bump mapping

Even tessellation / Micro Displacement (adaptive subdivision)

Sculpting


To shorten your time and gain more control