During this tutorial I will trying and show you how to make a really basic explosion using Geometric/Deformable objects in Max v4. The first thing you need to do is create an environment. A basic plain, some objects, and a main object that will act as the exploding object. I like my exploding things to be glassy, so I made a crystal ball (see crystal ball tutorial) and placed it in the middle of my perspective view.

Next we need to make a bomb. So go to the objects tab, then choose the deformer tab, than on the drop down menu choose Geometric/Deformable. Then click on the bomb object. The steps are numbered below.

 

Now Place your bomb somewhere in your perspective view. Then choose the tab below.

 

Once you have it selected, click and hold on your bomb, When you hold your mouse over the bomb, the cursor should change. Now while you are clicking and holding, drag your mouse over to the object you want to explode. Now the bomb is directly connected to your object. Now move your bomb right in the middle of the thing you want to explode.

While you have the bomb selected, click on the modifier tab and change the options of the bomb to match the ones below.

 

Now the explosion should be looking pretty good. Move your mouse down to the bottom left section of your page. You should see a scroll bar like the one below.

 

You can now move this back and forth, when you do, your object should explode.

Now all you have to do is render it. So click render, make the range 1 to 100, and were it says output, click save and make it an AVI file, with a title of your choice. Now just choose the dimensions that you want (the lower the better, because when rendering an animation, you must render each