There is a lot that you can do with this effect. Anything that you can do with Cinema 4D’s hair you can do with objects instanced onto it. This works very well with plants or objects that wave dynamically, much like hair would.

Tutorial

Setup

This is actually very easy to setup, all are you need are three things – An object to instance, an object to instance onto, and some c4d hair.

First off: Lets add some hair onto our ground plane (or wherever you want to add your instanced objects). A bunch of guide hairs are going to pop up – way to many actually. What you’re going to need to do now is in the object manager click on “Guides” scroll down to “Count” and then lower this down a bit.
After this lets click on the “Generate” tab. Under “Type” choose “Instance” and then an instance tab will appear in the attribute editor. Drag the object that you want instanced into the “Object” slot. Right at the top of this tab make sure to turn “Render Hairs” off.
If you were to render right now you’ll notice two big problems – Your instanced objects are incredibly skinny and the color of your objects aren’t showing up. To fix the skinniness of you’re objects what we’ll have to do is go into the Hair Material that is created with our hair – this is what’s telling C4D to make our objects really thin. In the Hair Material click on the “Thickness” option and chance the Root and Tip thickness to whatever looks best for your object. To get the materials of your instances to show up go back into your hair objects attributes and under the “Generate” tab click on “Keep Textures”
After this the only thing left is to is go into the “Dynamics” attributes of your hair object and change it to get your desired results.