I always wanted to nuke a city… you know, CG wise! 
So I did a quick test with Particle Flow and Box#2 (PhysX) to figure out a way one could go about achieving such an effect. Anyway, here is a rough render with a simple city built out of lots and lots of boxes; 16,130 to be precise.
My viewport struggled to display all the boxes but PhysX had no problem calculating the physics for me, which was very nice. And I finally figured out how to use motion blur with Particle Flow, that’s been bugging me for quite some time until now.
Next step will be to build some houses and pre-fracture them and then use those instead of boxes, add some particles for dust and debris and of course a huge mushroom cloud…
Cheers!
This is just amazing! Probably the coolest use of particles I’ve ever seen… or something like that. Matthias Müller is the genius behind this and it is absolutely brilliant!
It is done in 3ds Max with Particle Flow and the following plug-ins; FumeFX from SitniSati, Particle Flow Tools: Box #3 Pro by Orbaz and renderd with Krakatoa from Prime Focus.
Check out some other cool stuff Müller has done here:
http://www.vimeo.com/user624589/videos
http://matthiasm.cgsociety.org/gallery/
One day I will be able to create awesome things like this, just you wait and see! 
Cheers!
I’ve been wondering for a long time what is the deal with ThinkingParticles and in what way(s) it is “better” then Particle Flow or other standard particle systems.
Well, the deal is that it is rule-based and not time- or event-driven. So the particles isn’t just controlled by their age or whether they collided with an object or not. You can design your own “rules” for how the particles should behave. Here is an explanation and a simple example for how ThinkingParticles can be used (quoted from the developers website):
Here’s an example why ThinkingParticles is superior to other particle solutions. Imagine that you have to create a 3d space scene and you need to animate a space ship flying through an asteroid field. This field is full of everything from the most enormous rocks to the most intricate pieces of debris, all of it hovering around. Now imagine that your boss says, “The spaceship should avoid the big rocks but the smaller ones are allowed to collide and bounce off the hull of the spaceship.” This would be an animator’s nightmare. An event-driven particle system would fail to handle this kind of task because you would need to define a path through the asteroid field and then look for the exact key frames where things should happen. But what happens when you need to change the path of the ship or the amount of rocks or the balance between the big and small rocks?
ThinkingParticles makes it easy to solve such a situation with ease. Two rules will solve the rock collision and avoid problems. Conceptually, the rules would look something like this:
If SPACE SHIP GETS NEAR (VALUE) A ROCK
CHECK IF
BIG (VALUE) ROCK THEN AVOID IT (move around)
SMALL (VALUE) ROCK IGNORE AND DO COLLISIONEND
Of course, the above is not the real code fragment. In ThinkingParticles, you do not need to type any code at all. This is only the logic flow diagram of the ThinkingParticles operators and conditions. As you can see, there is no TIME related variable in it so this will always work. Regardless of any path or amount of frames. Whenever the space ship gets near a rock the rules control its behavior.
But I also found this video presentation that gives a very good idea of what it can be used for—and it is mighty impressive I’m telling you! 
For more information check out Cebas.com
Ta-ta!
Cebas has developed a new fracture plug-in for 3ds max, called VolumeBreaker. It looks impressive.
From Cebas.com