Looks like it was fun to make.
My one critisism would be that maybe it needs a bit more work on the materials. Some of them look a bit flat, especially the robot. Maybe some nice glossy reflections and some more metallic materials would be good, while still sticking to you colour scheme. Is that Fume and rayfire you're using? Looks like fun. Also, don't worry about lack of motivation here, that's definately not a problem. It's more of a lack of time thing. But thanks for the inspiration anyway.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

LOL. Yes, I stayed pretty basic with the materials. They actually looked better, but the company I work for said they didn't want me to use the normal color of their logo, so I had to pull off a color change in after effects, which distorted it a bit, but all in all, I like the end result. I found a good website for Royalty free suspense music and this one fit perfect. It's call "COVERT". I did us rayfire and fume. Good eye! I used 2 levels of Fume on the explosion. One for the rising smoke and one for a dropping dust effect on about a 1/2 of the fragments. This was a lot of fun to make. Hope some of the guys don't get offended with my bad Aussie accent... lol

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Rick

[Link to www.3dartconcepts.com]

Great stuff man. Your pyrotechnics is getting very sophisticated. I tried reading through some documentation on fume fx and decided it seemed too damn complicated. Is it hard to learn?

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No. I think it's very simple once you realized a few of the settings. There is a new thing in v2.0 that I'm trying to get to work properly, that is supposed to cut down on calculation times but make the smoke look more realistic. Once I figured out the "Heat" is this one thing I really needed to watch on different effects, I was able to accomplish more. By default, "Heat" is always set at 300. That makes for good flame smoke. For this effect, I used "Heat" of 100 so the explosions would rise slowly. If I had use 0, the smoke would have had no vertical movement. For the dust on the fragments, I used a -100 so it would fall slowly to the ground instead of rise. I can make some tutorials if you would like?

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Rick

[Link to www.3dartconcepts.com]

yeah man. I would like to have it in my arsenal. often its just a matter of knowing the basic procedure, I was mystified by reactor until I watched a few very simple tutorials and then it just all made sense. its not really something you can just work out by randomly plugging away at it. I've been playing with the maya fluids tools and they are pretty cool but I think fume fx may have more to offer.

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Is there anything in particular that you want a tutorial on or just something general like and easy explosion with just smoke or even some flame stuff?

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Rick

[Link to www.3dartconcepts.com]

Well, I wouldnt want to actually ask you to do too much. I know how long it can take to make a tutorial. I guess if you could explain in a simple non fat kind of way how to set up the various components of the fume system. maybe in a video or text, just the building blocks to achieve smoke and flame. I guess theres alot of stuff the cover. Recently I tried to learn a bit about realflow and managed to get some nice fluid but it took watching through hours and hours of video that went through every single aspect starting with ridgid body dynamics. I would have loved to see a quick straight to the point explaination of how to make a splash and then get the metablobs to look like water and not blobs of goo. So, yeah, if you have time, a brief 1, 2, 3, of how to get smoke and flame to interact with a scene with some tips on what to avoid would be awesome.

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I've been mucking around with Fume lately, doing a heap of tutorials and such, I might be able to knock out a quick startup tute this weekend. It'll be a good chance to see if I can do it when I haven't got a tutorial leading me through it step by step.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

yeah, you know when I make a tutorial movie, and especially when I was teaching at the mad academy it really makes that info clear in your mind. I recently made a super long very boring video tutorial on how to animate in maya, its far too boring for uploading to youtube but it helped me clarify many many things that I was doing but not entirely understanding in maya. I might still finish it but when i watch it, it doesnt feel quite ready to be ripped apart by the internet audience.

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I had a crack at making a vid over the weekend but it didn't turn out very well. I'll have another try in a couple of weeks when I've gone through a few more tutorials myself.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

While we're on the topic of fire and such, has anyone used Phoenix? It's a Fluid dynamics plugin by chaos group. It looks pretty cool and is also able to sim liquids. Not sure if there's a demo version of it though.

[Link to vray.info]

[Link to chaosgroup.com]

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

I heard about it but havent tried it, and I havent seen a demo floating around either. I'll check that out.

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