Bomb Space Warp

The Bomb space warp explodes objects into their individual faces.

Right: Bomb viewport icon

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Left: Torus knot

Effect of exploding the torus knot

Procedures

To create a Bomb space warp:

  1. On the Create panel, click (Space Warps). Choose Geometric/Deformable from the list, then on the Object Type rollout, click Bomb.
  2. Create mesh objects to be exploded.
  3. On the main toolbar, click (Bind To Space Warp).
  4. Drag the mouse between each object and the Bomb space warp.
  5. Adjust Bomb parameters to achieve different effects.

Interface

Explosion group

Strength
Sets the power of the bomb. Larger values make the particles fly farther. The closer an object is to the bomb, the greater the effect of the bomb.
Spin
The rate at which fragments rotate, in revolutions per second. This is also affected by the Chaos parameter (which causes different fragments to rotate at different speeds), and by the Falloff parameter (which causes the force of the explosion to be weaker the farther the fragment is from the bomb).
Falloff
The distance from the bomb, in world units, of the effect of the bomb. Fragments past this distance are not affected by the Strength and Spin settings, but are affected by the Gravity setting.

For example, this is useful for blowing up the base of a building, and having the top of the building topple. To see the effect, place a bomb at the base of a tall cylinder with many height segments, and adjust Falloff to be less than the height of the cylinder.

Falloff On Turn on to use the Falloff setting. The falloff range appears as a yellow, tri-hooped sphere.

Fragment Size group

These two parameters define the number of faces per fragment. Any given fragment will have a number of faces, randomly determined, between the Min and Max values.

Min
Specifies the minimum number of faces per fragment to be randomly generated by the "explosion."
Max
Specifies the maximum number of faces per fragment to be randomly generated by the "explosion."

General group

Gravity
Specifies the acceleration due to gravity. Note that gravity is always in the direction of the world Z axis. You can have negative gravity.
Chaos
Adds random variation to the explosion to make it less uniform. A setting of 0.0 is totally uniform; 1.0 is a realistic setting. A value greater than 1.0 makes the explosion extra chaotic. Range=0.0 to 10.0.
Detonation
Specifies the frame at which the bomb goes off. Bound objects are unaffected before this time.
Seed
Change to alter randomly generated numbers in the bomb. You can achieve a different bomb effect by changing Seed while maintaining the other settings.

Although you can animate strength and gravity, the equations used for projectile motion assume they are constant. Therefore, the motion will not be physically correct, but it might look interesting. Also, if the bomb object is in motion during the blast, the result is not physically correct.