Hi 0337396,
Thanks for the file and for using Amazon Cloud services.
In Hair, you can use a balloon as an Instance and go from there. But 10,000?
Here is a sketch with Hair and Instances. Not seriously (!), as I will explain below.
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/ocamY5gDzbK7pKNbA9YeXytn63Ql5XFBbdrSKz3gjRe
Doing this professionally, and I assume you are used to working in that way, would require a script/storyboard, so it is clear what shots you need from the setup. Just throwing 10,000 objects, polygons, and splines+ into dynamic and hoping that will sort itself out is not the way to go. At least not from my point of view. That is not efficient and hard to art direct.
What do you like to express? If you have 10K balloons, most of them might not be visible if they are in a cluster (as in your file), so why bother with around 80%-90% of them dynamically? I assume we are targeting visible results.
Brainstorming here (as it is close to midnight): Perhaps place some planes in space and animate them, then use those planes to clone Balloons on them, perhaps with a Random Effector and a Push-Apart Effector to keep them separate.
This would be a rig that is easy to manage and change. Add, as mentioned, some “scamp-ballons” into the mix, perhaps some “escaping balloons”, and it should work. You might want to tell a story, and a few balloons manually animated in the company of the big cluster will do that.
All the best
