Idea Help
Doug,
A 2D rectangle won't have enough faces to do a boolean function, so
what you'll have to do is create a 2d mesh grid and intersect that
with your object. If you collect the outer edge vertices first and
move them into the z axis, then collect the next closest set of
vertices and move them into the z axis and so on you create a
ballooning effect. This will be your final morph target. Once you
have it "ballooned" out then use 2d scale on the z axis and compress
the model into a thin line. Then when you morph from this to your
final target it will look like its ballooning out. As for the
explosion you'll just want the object to explode not the whole rubber
plane, correct? So you'll need to keyframe to the point of the
explosion. Then with a new sequence do the explosion on the surface
of the object only. To do this take your ballooned version and
collect the faces that you want to explode. And use create face
detach. This will give you a second object. To this you want to apply
the IPAS explode.
So the time line will look like this.
You render your morph sequence up to the point that the object will
explode. At that key frame, you will insert the final ballooned
version which has two objects, the set of faces (as an object) that
you want to explode and the portion which has ballooned out. You then
render the animation from that point with the explode sequence
starting at that frame number. You can keep all the objects in the
scene and render the morph sequence first with the exploding objects
hidden and then hide the morph objects and unhide the explode objects
and render the exlode sequence to completion.