I am working on making food pile up realistically using mesh deformation. The structural integrity is adjustable for different foods.

Structural integrity is achieved in two ways:

1. Only the bottom vertices are directly mapped onto the surface below; the rest are then moved relative to the bottom vertices.

2. The amount a vertex moves is inversely related to its height.

It could be tuned in terms of realism and optimization, but I’m currently happy with the result.