Hmm, all the links just take me to a page asking me to upload a file. I tried signing up, but I still get the same thing.
Final Year Short : Skyfall
HenningK
#66
Hold that damn camera steady!!
Ha. Awesome piece. Striking words and equally striking image.
It reminds me of WS Burroughs.
love,hen
equilibrium
#68
it`s totally amazing. I’ve seen many short movies on cgtalk, but this one is my favourite. It looks real, and the music is well chosen, it gives a specific atmosphere to the movie. It’s a short film that must be seen 
proxemics
#70
really amazing work man!!! on a note not regarding the cg…your song choice was perfect. out of all the godspeed songs out there, i dont think one could have worked better. their audio tone matches your visual tone in this perfectly…again, great work man!
There’s not much I can say that hasn’t been said. However I will say that I disagree with Joscci, who was hoping for the animation to be played forwards. Well first of all, it is, just somewhat obscured by the credits. I feel that playing it forwards, after in reverse of course, would have just been too expected, and dare I say cheesy. The way it was cloaked by the credits was both unexpected and helped maintain the mood that the artist so perfectly captured. Well done.
AdrianWilliams
#72
That is freaking AWESOME mate the feel, mood, animation, compositing everything was just awesome, really nice work mate. Truly works its front page and 4 stars from me. You gonna be applying for The Mill any time soon? lol
But again the Comp-skills are really superb was shake use all the way? That Image degrading is a very nice touch as well make all the differences
I’m sure you’ve kind of all ready explained this, but I’m still unclear, and maybe this is a dumb question, but how did you avoid interpenetration errors with all that debri? I’ve been experimenting with building destruction and such, and yes I am a noob to dynamics, but I just can’t get around this problem in my tests. If you could shed some light on this for me that would be great.
Synthesizer
#74
Very interesting “making of” stuff. That report is a pretty good read. I’m trying to use your shatter script, but I don’t seem to be having much luck with it. What sort of numbers do you usually use in it?
azshall
#75
links now say bandwith limit exceeded 
… I was lookin forward to reading the PDF and check out your scripts (if they were available) …
I did a shot for the show E-Ring where a bridge explodes into thousands of chunks. (Not to steal thunder, was going to talk about my process of shattering the bridge into pieces) … I used a plugin for lightwave called CrackIt! … which I believe is free? I don’t know lightwave really, just how to import and run the plugin … and export back to OBJ. But, it uses booleans of shapes based on a few integers for randomizing. Pretty damn nice, and when its done it leaves a hairline crack between the surfaces so that they aren’t touching (which was great for the animation) … If I had to deal with ground collisions, then my next step which was particle instancing each chunk of the bridge BACK unto the particles (to re-build it as instanced particles) wouldn’t have worked 
…
Awesome job… Hope the bandwith limit thing gets fixed soon… Does anyone have the files they can host up somewhere until its fixed?
az
Although I’m in danger of repeating myself thankyou again for all your comments, one thing I feel I should point is out is please don’t hold back on any criticisms you have with the project. Some of the most interesting opinions I’ve read are from people who have differing opinions on things.
4th-Child - Yup, Shake all the way, I love shake ;). As far as what companies I want to work for I think I’m just going to try for the usual London suspects, Framestore, MPC, Dneg, Glassworks etc and see what happens.
EcthelionOfGondor - Yes, interpenetration errors were a real headache throughout the dynamics. When using novodex it doesn’t break when interpenetration as such, it just causes an effect that I’d class as a “free explosion” where all object fly apart from each other at force on frame 1. This was particularly a problem as novodex only uses collision proxy shapes which don’t properly match the actual shape which means when a lot of geometry is held tightly together there’s a lot of overlap. Normally to get round this you set the collision offset depth to a negative value but Novodex doesn’t have this option. So the best way to do it for me was to simply scale down every object relative to its centred pivot (to say 70% original size), run the simulation at this small size to reduce overlap and then scale back the object after all the simulations were baked to keys.
Synthesizer - My shattering script/workflow really isn’t in a state where I could recommend it to other people yet, it was merely enough to get me through the project. I intend to improve the script and add proper comments at some point. For the shatterSurface command the first parameter is the number of cuts (say 400). The next is the number of times it will pick random faces to find bigger ones, the higher this is the slower but the more likely faces will be of roughly similar area, I find 5 is a good bet. The last is how much of an angle it will place cuts at, if you set this to zero all cuts will be pretty much perpendicular to the edge, at 1 they will make some crazy angles, 0.4 should be ok. Also it’s worth turning off your undo queue and history when running any substantial number of operations with this command. Once you’ve placed some random cuts you can run a polysmooth and you should have some reasonably random topology which you can use to create shattered chunks. I’m still trying to figure out a better overall workflow though.
Azshall - I upgraded my sites bandwidth yesterday but it got swamped again over the course of 24 hours and is now down, it should be back up again tomorrow as its the first of the month. Hopefully now I’ve dropped off frontpage the traffic should be a little more sustainable. If necessary though I can provide yousendit links to anyone interested. Sounds like a pretty nifty lightwave plugin although I don’t know lightwave one bit, I’m curious to know how the actual process of it worked. I found that given how quick novodex was I didn’t need to use instanced particles (although to be honest there should be a lot more flying bits of small debris). I’d be interested to see anything from the shot you mentioned. I have a coursemate who did a similar dynamics project to mine but involving a tornado (I think he’ll put it up on CGtalk soon) and he used a booleans based approach to creating debris but I found his pipeline only worked on buildings that were largely planar.
Aerny
#77
absolutely outstanding work…!
really impressive atmosphere and very photorealistic.
Cheers,
Arnold Veeman - composer - arranger - music director
www.arnoldveeman.com
caulfield
#79
i found it pretty funny that you used computer games as your reference! hahaha…geeks.
Nice work though. Don’t get me wrong. You rock.