Andres de Mingo  made this  nice shot, an animated character breaking some
skulls and then 5K skulls falling over it, done in 3d Max using Pulldownit
plugin for all dynamics effects.

Breaking the skulls on the cave floor

All skulls are set as static convex bodies to be activated at first hit, the hammer is set also as a kinematic convex body  to speed up computation, the floor of the cave isn’t flat so I had to set it as a static mesh body to can use its real shape in collisions, also I made a couple of large boxes on both sides as barriers to prevent skulks rolling out of the camera view, those barriers where hidden in render, some skulls breaks when being hit, they were shattered in around 120 fragments each one combining both uniform and local styles,  and I set them as static “first hit” fracture bodies, after playing the simulation with PDI the skulls reacted to the hammer impact and got broken nicely at a very fast computation rate.

Making The skulls stack

Starting with a single skull I created 5000 instances using the make array tool in 3ds Max, then I set  all of them as PDI dynamic convex bodies, however the stack was completely uniform, like a box of objects,  to get a more natural look of the skulls falling  I set random initial velocities for them using PDI and compute a few frames before the skulls where visible in camera, so when reaching the stage they were nicely disordered.

Destroying the Skeleton

I set the animated skeleton as a kinematic body and create 3 additional falling skulls hitting it in the head and shoulders at specific time according to character animation, but the most tricky part of the shot was destroying the skeleton, for this  I created a frozen copy it, I set it as a PDI convex body and hide the duplicated skeleton, then when the stack of skulls reached it I replaced the animated skeleton for the dynamic one and this made the trick, the skeleton parts were falling while being hit and covered by the skulls.

Conclusions

You can find the skulls, skeleton  and other cool models by Andres de Mingo in

layerforged

they offer  a wide variety of 3D printed resin miniatures for your modeling projects, role-playing games (DnD, Pathfinder, HeroQuest) and much more.