Is there a way to make an object shatter or buckle in an animation? A modifier, perhaps, that would cause various faces to scatter randomly? I don’t want to model miscilaneious pieces and parent them to make an explosion. Something kind of like this picture is what I had in mind.
with the newer particle patches, which you can find at www.graphicall.org you can click the explode button where the modifiers are usually found (F9)
with that enabled, you just have to go to the particle settings and increase your normal value, which is the initial speed at which the particles are being released, and enable random and even from the Emit From
i’ve also found that changing your endtime to 2 makes it so the particles are emitted very quickly, like an explosion
also, there’s another modifier in the normal blender version called build - it’s an animaiton mod so alt A is your friend 
it does exactally what it says - builds - so if you want a desentagration, you can render and use the video sequence editor to reverse the frames for it to ‘dissolve’
hope that helped
I tried one of them. More questions:
There were a million MODs. Which one works the best for that?
How do I make blender open with the mod automatically, instead of having to double click the exe?
When I render a preview, the shrapnel isn’t rendered, just a bunch of white dots. I want it the other way around, with no “Particles” but just the shrapnel.
Anyone?
Is there a quick way to do an explosion with rigid bodies? I’ve been messing about with them and I can modify the dLoc setting for an object and have it fly off but it’s very tricky and not really practical if I want to explode a lot of objects. i.e 100.
I was hoping for a Python script but I couldn’t find one where I could place the 3D cursor in the center of the blast. Block select say 100 objects and then enter a force value. And then the script would automatically turn each object into actors/dynamic/rigid bodies and alter the dLoc settings so the centre of each object moves away from the cursor.
With perhaps a random element added in.
Anyone know anything like that?
Explode.py by jms is about the closest you’ll get:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Scripts/Catalog/AnimationPage3
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