First, create nurbs or poly plane and make it looks like simple terrain, nothing fancy… Also create some lights.

Then create wall using cube with some decent number of divisions. Texture it if you want.

Duplicate it. Why? One will be original wall, and the second will be the one we are going to destroy. First will appear in animation before explosion and second will appear during explosion.

Hide first wall (you can put it in layer). Create another cube. This cube will be used to create area of shattering.

Deform it. I used this in tower tutorial. Duplicate it.

Duplicate the second wall. Now you have 3 copies of the same wall. Second will be wall after explosion, and third will be part of the wall that will fly around.

So now select second wall and cube and do mesh/Booleans/difference

Then select third wall and the second cube and do mesh/Booleans/intersection

Note, before using Booleans delete history on objects.

Then select the second wall (wall with hole) and go to dynamics menu set, delete its history and apply default lambert1 material to it. Go to effects/create shatter option box. In tabs select solid shatter and for post operation select shapes. Change the count to desired number of pieces.

After few seconds of calculation you shall get pieces.

Now select terrain and go soft/rigid bodies/create passive rigid body. Passive rigid body is object that is interacting with other rigid bodies, but it’s not affected by any force. Two passive rigid bodies doesn’t interact, passive rigid bodies interact only with active rigid bodies.

Then select shards and go soft/rigid bodies/create active rigid body. Active rigid body is affected by forces, and it is interacting with active and passive rigid bodies.

Select all shards and in the channel box click in inputs click rigidbodyXX, list of attributes shall appear. Scroll down and turn the collisions off. If you don’t do this shards will penetrate each other, because distance between them is 0. All dynamics operate with offset which is by default 0,1.

Also you can change the mass of the bodies. I did this according to size of the objects.

Select the second wall and make it passive rigid body.

Now unhide the first wall. I wanted explosion to start at frame 25. That means that wall will be normal first 24 frames. So at frame 24, in the channel box set visibility to 1 (on) then right click on visibility and in the popup menu click key selected. In frame 25 set it to 0 (off) and key it. For second wall and shards do the opposite.