So I'm trying this shattered glass animation (and doing it the old fashioned way) with 75 individual shards pieced together into one pane. I want to use physics, but I have several questions. 1) Do I need to apply physics to each individual piece, or can I select the group and turn of physics for just that? 2) I imagine I should only use forces, and set the initial velocity to zero, but is this thinking correct? 3) How can I get the glass to shatter from the middle and out toward the camera, as if another object is breaking it? Thanks for the help. I don't use 3D much anymore and I use it even less frequently for animation.

If you want the glass to fall down (vs a zero gravity flyout) you will need some downforce to get the glass to drop. You will need physics on all the glass parts. If you have the free "Attribute Iterator" plug-in from AssociatedFX you can drag select all 75 and apply it in one shot. To get it to break from the middle drop a sphere into the scene and scale it down so that it is small enough to hit just the middle part of the stacked up glass shards. You can hide the sphere during the render or bake the physics onto the glass and delete the sphere ( a good way to speed things up once you have the glass flying the way you want it) The sphere would need an initial velocity in the right direction to get it moving. If you have C5 I have a simple sample file I can put up here. wayne k guam usa

Why not use the regular "Explode" modifier?