Hi there, this is Dave from videoeffectuniversal.com and today’s tutorial was how to blow up a planet in 3D studio max 9. I have been asked to do this tutorial but quite of few people of foreign ground to doing it.

Now, if you have learned how to create a planet earth using my previous tutorial, you should have something like this. There you go, is not perfect but very, very good likeness of the planet earth completely with glow and right want we want to do is go over to your create panel here and go to the stem of primitives, click on the slider and what we want to do is to click on the particle system then we want to select P array which is particle array. You to go to against the top view point here here, we want to drag it in, there we have it.

In the basic parameters area here, we want to click pick objects right, and then you want to go up to this bottom here which select any object in the seen, we can go by percentage and I want to click on the surface. Now, click on the pick, now just a sign this to be the earth object that explodes. Nothing is going to happen just yet, so we just to trick a bit more right.

Open up the particle type slider and we want to change this to object fragments and then we want to go down to here and changes the thickness to 11. No need to change the earth amount chunks because the earth is very, very big thing we are going to change to around about 2zerozero. Now, this all depends on your computer, how powerful it is because the more chunks you used, the more RAM is going to use and the slow would be to render. You do have to be careful of that right because thus not we want, we got through out to the top here right into our basic parameters and chose mesh and then you go.

As we see now, we now have chunks of planet coming out. So, just go down back here again and make sure we choose get a material. We going to select service and then there you go. It will now change into the pieces form the planet earth

This will not work if your object is grouped and so basically if you have got planet earth and you got multiple layer grouped in to an object, you have to un group it all and just the one object otherwise this is not will work . Obviously we have another problem as afar you can see as we put the fragments out here. We still the earth underneath and the explosion looks a bit too hysterical way does not it? It is not random is not is not chunks flying out everywhere in different direction and different speed. We are going to solve that now.

What we want to do is open up the rotation and collision. We want to change the spin time to 50 we want to open the object motion inheritance and change the influence to zero. Now we are going to slit how long the explosion last for. What we want we going to do is trying to find particle generation open that one up right this is were we start the isometric explosion. Now the fault the explosion start right at zero but we do not want that so we are trying to start around about 20. So, start the emitter at 20 and it is really up to you how long you want it to last for, Meaning, if you want to last for just a hundred frames, the explosion not going to very big so if just we open a bit more, we change it to 200 and then what we want to do is to change the life of it to I do not know 180.
Basically what is we do is a cause the explosion fragments to last a hell a lot longer right. So, that is quite effective basic you can see they will disappear in frames hundreds so we need to change that to 200. Now if we keep going the fragments still, show in, and the screen there you see. Now, we want to do is key frame on planet earth to disappear as soon as the explosion kicks in. So, basically it kicks in frame number 20 so want we want to do is to go to key frame 19 set auto key and we go up to here We want to select the atmosphere, the clouds and the surface select set key frame go to number 20, right click object properties and change this, the rendering control to zero. What this has done is set key frame for the actual planet disappear at the second when the explosion kicks in right…