In my demo reel, I included a scene from a Minecraft animation I made called "Skywars: Apocalypse," where I include a giant monster destroying a house made of Minecraft blocks using a giant ring weapon he holds. I created this in Blender, using rigid body physics and manually creating each block to be individually hit and create this massive exploding house effect.
Knowing that we use Maya at UTD, I wanted to see if I would be able to do the same effect within Maya. I was pleased to learn that Maya's collision physics work very similar to what I'm used to in Blender! In the FX section of Maya, you can attach a "Passive Rigid Body" to objects that will remain stationary but have collision (ex: the ground plane in the video below), and an "Active Rigid Body" to everything moving in the simulation (the cylinder and the blocks). I then add a gravity effect to the blocks, and a uniform force to push the cylinder into the blocks, adjusting things like mass, the force of the cylinder being pushed, etc.