I'm sprinkling Smarties on ice-cream. The Smarties are in a collection and I use a particle system linked to a disk that is above the ice-cream. The Smarties nicely fall from the disk onto the ice-cream. The ice-cream is set with Collision so the Smarties stick to it. All good so far. The only problem I have is that some of the Smarties intersect each other, does not look good. There are quite a lot of threads about this problem I want to use the solution described on this page: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/modifiers/physics/particle_instance.html#examples They explain how to use a Particle Instance Modifier and use the Offset property:
"A relative offset in the range of particles used for instantiation. Allows you to avoid overlapping of the used particles, when the same particle system is used in multiple modifier instances."
I'm not 100% sure on which object to add the Particle Instance. If I add it to my disk, then the disk does not appear in the Object list.
If I add it to the ice-cream, I can then select the disk as the object, but then Blender freezes for a while then crashes.
Not sure where to go from here. I cannot place the particles manually, I have many different scenes in which I need this method of sprinkling particles.
edit 30.5: i'm adding a simplified scene to demonstrate the problem. Just run the animation, at around step 35 you will see 2 cubes being emitted that intersect each other. I cannot add the particle instance modifier to the disc because in the object property i cannot see the disc in the list. If I add the modifier to the ice-cream, then I can see the disc in the object list, but when i select it, Blender freezes and then crashes. Link to file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_2Zx8aoPe_Dbq4Fcp-quBlvUPTEp7Jgw/view?usp=sharing
Edit 30.5: after suggestion below, I tried the Molecular Script addon and it works. Here is the file with the addon and settings. https://drive.google.com/file/d/18fJCNNUJ3QACzlB3urTOfxkJ8HbKtEhr/view?usp=sharing
