Quote - These are pretty neat! It's an effect I've been considering playing with. Any tips or suggestions from your experience in making these?

Thanks, to all of you.

An important tip: explore the power of Carrara shaders. It's one of the best features of this software and could save a lot of work. Many of shaders are animatable and you can use it to create some cool effects.
Mixing Multi Channels (the planet collapse effect), using the Psychedelic on the Alpha Channel, creating some nice textures using the operators too (Overlay, Subtract, Multiply). That's how I create the shockwave effect. Without particles, just animating the shader of a circular vertex objet and incresing the size of the object. ;)