The Tips in detail

 "How do I blast an object?"

No I'm not going to tell another tutorial. I'll just point out some things I saw going wrong.

Exploding objects have prooven to make the willing ones learn many things they never thought about before.

The frontdoor-approach to some really attractive hours of wasting time usually leads either via the Bomb-spacewarp: "Link, set, blast... huh? Did I want this?" or via the "combustion" atm-FX: "cool... what if I change this... oops."

The Bomb-spacewarp has the annoying effect to blow objects to flat faces (instead of the suspected solid fragments) and misses the fire-part (and behaves somewhat strange to gravity.) From the other hallway those come into play who tried the Combustion atm-FX, got some cool blasts and are now out for fragments.

After some time of trying to get the best out of both you will want to see reasonable solid fragments splatter away from the former prime-evil inside your ultra-cool I-blew-them-all-scenario... That's where the RTFM comes handy. Try your Particle-Systems: ParticleArray. You will find (some way down the settings) the "objectfragments". Setting the viewport display type to "mesh" and linking the PArray to the "you will be history!"-object gives a nice stand-up blast. As soon as you hit the "play"-button the very first time after setting up your blast, you will be addicted for some time...

By the time you will add the neccessary fire and notice that you finally found the reason why you need a faster computer. So be warned! Addictive stuff there!

Explosions are quite difficult to get them look real. Although the main instruments of the atm-FX combustion and the PArray will bring you most of the time to more than just satisfying results. You will have your time practicing. Afterwards you will have some idea about what I mean by saying: "Looks easy. Sounds easy. Just like they said about compoundobjects!" Be honest: how many renderings did it take for you until you applied the "turn-reference-object-invisible"-trick? I think BlurFire from Blur Studios inc., FreePyro from Cebas, Vertex / Object / Particle Combustion from Peter Watje are some free plugs you will want to try. If you still want more you should try the commercial plugs like the Sandblaster (great for disolving), Outburst, Pyrocluster...

Consider what you are blowing. Spaceships have different explosions in atmosphere, deep space or in a shelter. Explosions are emitting light in surprising manners. Fragments are, well, fragmented to irregular odd-looking bits. There is smoke. There is fire. There is motion.

First of all: observe (from a safe distance) how things explode. I'm talking about watching some action-movies. And some SciFi shoot'em-ups. I'm not talking about joining your local bomb-squad on their disarm-tour or something like this. How does what kind of explosion look like? Why does it look this way and why doesn't it look like that? How are the fragments moving? How are objects fragmented?

One metric ton of stone or rock, eg. a statue, has a good load of fragments of all sizes if blown, down to the size of faint dust. The same statue made of steel blows - if atall - to a few bent fragments. Stone is brittle, inflexible and has a (more or less) fragile crushable crystalin structure. Steel has a much more durable molecular structure and is surprisingly flexible. Liquids have no solid fragments but splashes and sparkles. Complex objects like for instance houses or cars consist of several assembled objects. Different objects means different textures, fragments, motions. You might want to start trying to fiddle with several PArrays and atm-FX Combustions now. Ah yes, and now it's time to learn the material game. You will need knowledge about mat-ids, material-type particle-motion and particle-age and howto assign them correctly to the fragments. And don't forget the motion-blur.

Unless you blowup something in deepspace your explosions are affected by gravity and wind. Smoke is a point to consider. The way fire or the center of an explosion looks like depends largely on what is the cause for the blast. Two colliding asteroids out in space will rarely have fire but loads of fragments. A fuel-loaded truck blown away by 20kg TNT will have a lot of fragments, too, but more noticeable is that enourmous fireball...

The color of an explosion varies depending on the temparature, the environment and the actual explosive. An explosion will start with some lightly colored flash changing to a dark one over the time. For example start your blast with some white with a bit of yellow, faint over yellow to orange to red. Make the colors darker over the time. Reduce the emitted light in the same manner you let your blast become darker. Fireblalls become less persistant over the time because the hot gases have to fill larger areas and cool down faster.

Most large explosions have one major explosion happening first and some minor ones following more or less instantly thereafter near the explosions core. Small bombs give one short blast. Have an eye on the timing, the measures and dimensions.

Explosions are emitting light. Again it depends on what explodes to answer questions like: how much light of what kind is emitted over what period? Remember that fireballs aren't constant lightsources (Use animated noise here.) They vanish in irregular ways over the time. Most of the time they travel because hot gases go up in atmosphere.

The more complex your object is the more you should consider using some Gravities, several PArrays and several Combustions more. Take care of the timing. Already added wind?

Take care about the motion of your fragments. The larger a fragment is the slower it will tumble and turn (more energy needed for movement). Also large fragments are more affected by gravity than small ones. Small particles usually travel faster than their larger cousins.

Keep in mind that those heavy explosions very often have a shockwave traveling faster than the fragments or the fire. Many times the camera is within the vicinity of such a shockwave. Shake the camera as the wave hits it. This should usualy occure some fraction of a second to a few seconds after the initial blast. Calculate the timing by using the speed of sound in the atmospheric media of your scene (ie. air, water) as a rule of thumb. You can calculate the stregth-falloff by 1/(x * x), where x is the distance. Remember that no explosion has an unlimited range. The strength of the positional distortion should refer to the explosions strength and the distance between the camera and the point of blast.

Make up your mind about what happens to your fragments after the blast. Using "die on collison" might make sense if linked properly to the surrounding objects. If your fragments burn, you might want to fade their oppacity over the time they travel.

If you don't know how to setup your basic explosion: there are several tutorials concerning explosions out there.