3ds max help: explosion

[gardener]

I still dont know how can you animate an object to explode?
do you need to import an explosion clip to the object?

[Testament-Doom]

Well, to make a type of explosion.. I'm going to assume you want to explode an object realistically. To do that, you would need to clone that object with all the materials to it at the same exact spot as the original object, shell it, cut fracture pieces through it, and have it not shown before the explosion, and right when the explosion happens, make the original one disappear and the fractured one appear, and push them all outward from the center with some sort of force. That's the general idea towards realistic pieces flying out from an explosion. You could also just make some debree, have the explosion overtake the object, make the object disappear, then have some of the debree flying outwards. Whatever works.

[Morgan Gillespie]

Here is part of my particles lesson I wrote for my sudents and the first part covers basic particle explosions through usage of P-array. While it doesn't cover the smoke/fire part of the explosion it covers the object part, if you wanted to go real easy you could use an atmospheric aparatus and use the built in fire effect, and then the explosion setting.

Anyway to save time I will just post my lesson here.

Originally Posted by Lesson 6 by Morgan Gillespie

Lesson 6: Basic Particle Systems

Particle systems are simply objects that create a whole bunch of objects, called particles, for dust, snow, rain, smoke, what ever. The catch is, you cannot edit them as you would a mesh. So, you cannot pull up edit poly and fix tiny little errors.

Yet, you can however use particles with deflectors, to simulate particles moving around another object, gravity, to simulate gravity, or space warps, for added realism / complicated effects.

Particles can get much more complicated from here on so we are going to stick to basics on 3 main particle effects, parray, super spray, and snow. Simply because I could ramble on for hours about different uses for particles, deflectors, pflow, and crap I am already rambling.

Ok let’s start with PArray
Go to Create, Geometry, Particle Systems, and click PArray.
It should look like this
http://img254.imageshack.us/img254/5617/image1oz4.jpg
PArray has two main uses,
Use A: to create particles using an object as an emitter, by its faces, edges, or vertices.
Use B: Cool explosions!
Since use A is rather boring, we will just skip it and do part B.
Create a geo-sphere, Icosa, with 3 segments
http://img111.imageshack.us/img111/1390/image2sy5.jpg
^Those settings^
(Size doesn’t matter; yes that is 11 feet and 3 inches)
In normal units that is about 135
Click on PArray, go to modify, and click “pick object” and select the geosphere
http://img111.imageshack.us/img111/6171/image3wy6.jpg
Open up the Particle type rollout and select the Object Fragments radio button
http://img166.imageshack.us/img166/9411/image4pa4.jpg
Now Scroll up to the basic parameters rollout and under viewport display select mesh
http://img111.imageshack.us/img111/3941/image5bg2.jpg
Now if we drag the time slider back and fourth across the screen
The polys of the geosphere will shoot off creating a very fake explosion
http://img166.imageshack.us/img166/6742/image6lp8.jpg
Ok, now create a plane slightly underneath the sphere
About the spheres radius away
Then go into Create, Spacewarps, deflectors, and then click PDynaFlect (which means planar dynamics deflector) Click and drag to create a deflector plane roughly the same size as the plane
With the deflector plane selected click quick align on the main toolbar then select the geometric plane you created before to the deflector plane aligns/moves itself to it.
http://img166.imageshack.us/img166/5850/image7uq1.jpg The quick align button
Click OK and your screen should look somewhat like this
http://img111.imageshack.us/img111/4434/image8mc5.jpg
Now in the same pull down as deflectors find forces, select gravity and in the top viewport create it anywhere
Now again on the main toolbar find the bind to space warp button
http://img106.imageshack.us/img106/5522/image9sb6.jpg
This button is left of the move, rotate and scale buttons
Click and drag from the gravity force you created to the PArray
Now do the same for the deflector plane
http://img264.imageshack.us/img264/2549/image10du2.jpg
The particles are now actually interacting with the environment. While they still do not look even slightly convincing and randomly disappear at frame 30, they look a lot better than before
http://img106.imageshack.us/img106/7908/image11bx9.jpg
Click on the PArray and go to modify, you should see two modifiers
If not you did something wrong, go back and try again.
http://img444.imageshack.us/img444/3278/image12iw1.jpg
Click PArray so we can change the settings
Open up the Particle Generation Rollout
Change the variation percentage under speed to 5% and change Life to 100
Drag down and open up the Rotation and Collision roll out
Set spin time to 15, variation to 10%, enable Interparticle Collisions
Go back to the Particle Type roll out
Find “Object Fragment controls”
Set thickness to any number >0 preferably something somewhat thick so it looks like chunks
Select Number of Chunks rather than all faces and set this number to any number through 50 and 75
The deflector and gravity are disabled while editing the PArrays original settings but once you leave it, those modifiers are reactivated (that is true of course if you have show end result off)
Scrubbing the time bar will lag now since there are many calculations each frame
Now of course this explosion looks strange due to the fact the sphere is still there and seems to be shedding its shell rather than exploding, if we hide the sphere. NOT DELETE!
http://img444.imageshack.us/img444/5...gefinalnm6.jpg
Pretty snazzy
OK moving on.

Super Spray....

There is much more, I think lesson 6 was about 9 pages. Lesson 5 was a video, which I probably should redo. Anyway, I hope that helps.

[gardener]

Thanks for the help... lots of testing for me to do then... heh