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In this tutorial we create a dynamic spline that can hold the weight of a rigid body. This is done by using a spring object. This video shows you how to set this up.

I am no stranger to this type of mesh myself, and indeed have made setups for clients in the past that do largely what you want, but weren't designed for animation alas... This setup is all polygons and cloners for example with displacers doing the general bumpiness. It did slow my scene right down too, but you can turn off any SDS or set clones to be multi-instances (may be in R20 ?, can't remember) to get things faster... CBR

It seems unlikely that anyone will have already scanned this specific bar and made that model available for download, but I can certainly tell you how to make it from scratch in a way that would actually end up superior to even a scanned model... Never has the phrase 'model things in the same parts as they exist in the real world' been so applicable ! If you break this bar down to its individual components, and model / texture those with enough care you can break this down into easy manageable chunks. Unfortunately I can't see what the sides are doing, so you'd have to show me. But the top seems to be 4 different kinds of nut and a chocolate drizzle on top of whatever the base is... So I'd start with those. Use simple primtives and deformers to make a few different models of each type of nut. Displacers most useful here I imagine. Big ones you can manually place, but for the smaller sprinkler type nuts you can clone onto the surface and randomise parametrically. The chocolate drizzle I would do with either spline dynamics or the volume builder. CBR

Also, for this to work, leave the groundplane itself visible during rendering the AOV and don't use the alpha for it

My guess would be that after turning off the background, your black dark background that Arnold creates is visible through the transparent plastic. So in order to have this be affected by the AOV mask as well, you should try to get an AOV out of the entire ground plane; put a custom AOV tag on the plane, enable transmit AOVs in the plastic shader and render out the custom AOV for the ground plane, then you should be able to composit with that later on