I have just completed a tutorial for Maya7 explaining how to fill a bowl with a particle instancer. The result is a nice quick way to create containiners full of instance geometry. Like a bowl full of pills, rice, peas, popcorn, cornflakes or what ever. This tutorial is about 12 mins long and is completely free.
Downloaded it from my site here:
https://www.kickarz.com/tutorial04.rar (about 55Mb)
The .rar contains the video tutorial, a Maya7 scene file so you can follow along with it and a basic image texture for the Pill.
If anyone would like to see the result animation -
https://www.kickarz.com/result.wmv (3.5Mb right pick - save target as).
PS: If the admins of SimplyMaya would rather I didn't promote my own tutorials here, then please feel free to delete this thread. Also if you feel this tutorial is worthy of your free section then be my guest

Below is a single render of the tutorial result to wet your appetite.
Cheers,
Dave.