Asteroid Gravity Simulation - Forming a planet with rigid bodies in Maya // Warum Planeten rund sind

There hasn't been an update for a long time - but now there is it.
This time I'm using the Bullet Plugin for dynamics simulation. Because neither Maya's nParticles nor the Bullet Plugin itself support real gravity I had to write my own per-frame-script to simulate gravity.
The script calculates the gravitational force between each rigid body and then adds this force to the acceleration vector of the rigid body.
The initial asteroid belt is also created by a self-written script. It creates instances from a set of predefined shapes and gives them a random initial speed, rotation, mass and size.

This time I've did the simulation with 4000 rigid body. The simulation ran at a speed of ~ 0.2 frames per second on an Intel Xeon E3-1231.
The length of the simulation was 400 frames and afterwards I stretched it to 1200 frames.
For the final test I want to do a simulation with 10.000 rigid bodies.

The background is a 32000x16000 texture showing the calculated sky/milky way from the Tycho 2 star catalogue. I've created it also using a self-written program which parses the catalog data and adds the real color temperature to each star.

[Thisisquitestupidinnit]

This is how i personally believed the moon formed

[BlenderRookie]

Each particle is acting like they have their own gravity and then the4 gravity combines when the particles combine.

[gerardjacquesvanwyk]

I feel that this is a step backwards from the old "gravity dice simulation" video that just had newtonian physics,
this version has far too many extra artificial forces added to it, and that looks neither natural nor pleasing.

What your subscribers want is to see is a large number of dice with random starting positions interacted on only by newtonian gravity, no other forces.(weak gravity makes for more interesting scenarios than high gravity scenarios).

BTW the asteroids look like teeth. very freaky.