explosion debris in max 9

[Deleted User]

hay all. Iv got a new system and upgraded from max 4-6 to max 9. With older versions of 3dmax to blow up a mesh into chunky debris it was as simple as creating a PArray, setting it to object fragment/inherit material, setting thickness to whatever value and changing start and finish time to the same frame. Finally you would set the number of fragments by changing use rate or use total to whatever (usually use total to 10-100) After adding a light source and a fire effect this worked a charm. But with the newer versions of max isntead of having use rate or use total theres some other garbage and no matter how low i set the paramters i get thousands upon thousands of tiny fragments instead of 10-20 chunks with a few little bits here n there.

How do i get the same effect in max9 as i did in max 4 and (i think i cant remember 6)

[Deleted User]

Hmmm, I've just tried it using a particle array in max 9 and it worked perfectly for me. You may need to change the start and finish times, though, to one frame different, otherwise it might not display anything (my experience), but I had no garbage when working with what I was doing. Just fooling around with it then, it was working fine, exactly as I'd had it working in other versions of max and with no tiny fragments, just the big chunks I'd requested.