shockwaves + shooting glass would be way cooler than spammed clouds of smoke

I like the light in the middle, but what are the shadows doing?

Buildings really look like that, when they're collapsing. You don't see the glass, you just see a hell of a lot of dust, at least at at that distance- at scale, we're maybe 300 meters away.

Sorry, I wasn't going for Hollywood effects there- when a real building gets hit by a real bomb, the bomb does all the flashy shit, the building just falls apart and dust goes everywhere. You might see a fair amount of glass go flying with a skyscraper that's mainly glass on the outside, but only for a moment- after that, all the concrete dust is everywhere.

Video references:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKeENdyIluI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wfpRO9bTfo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiNrzmbdC1Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khD2gZkk ... re=related

...and ofc, war footage and the WTC towers footage.

IDK, I guess I'll have to make a video when I'm happier with the mushroom cloud- it looks pretty damn real when it's moving, at the scale it's supposed to be at.

I'd reconsider the smoke on the top floors. Dust clouds mainly form at the base of a building, unless it is a flour warehouse or something equally dusty.

Looking forward to that video though (to see if i spoke to soon :) )

If you watch the videos, you'll see why there's dust from the top floors- when tall buildings collapse, they tend to break in stages as gravity pulls them apart. There's more dust from the bottom than up high, that's certainly true, and it's set up that way in the explosion animation as well.

I had a thought, though, about a cheap way to increase the realism, now that I suddenly have all the texture space I can eat: pre-rendered "chunks".

I think the effect's very nice, personally- until I have time for the video, try and imagine them all falling really randomly, etc.:
In fact, I like that enough that I'll probably do the same thing for mechanical explosions- random bits of metal, etc. would probably look really good there.

You need to start the effect at the base of the tower and then start the collapse of the tower, and time it so that the cloud propagating upwards, and the tower falling downwards, meet about the halfway point, then the cloud moves outwards and down

Shadows kinda weird.

Here's a short clip, showing how it works. This was taken in World Builder, so the usual rubble and other stuff that happens after a building dies isn't present.

And the shadows are just the usual, screwed-up, I've-been-bitching-about-them-for-over-a-year-now Spring shadows.

The other guys are being too critical - it's a damned good effect. But yes, it could be better. I agree, I'd start the smoke puffs at different times - start from one floor and progress up/down quickly.

Also, I'd have the building visibly accelerating downwards before it's engulfed in smoke. It's a little obvious that the model just vanished.

Actually, I don't vanish it until it's underground, it just gets hidden by everything that's going on.

I suppose I can drop the particles on the upper floors though, give the lower ones a longer lifetime so they'll stick around long enough to hide the final bit when it does disappear. It'll actually save CPU to do it that way, since (unlike CEG) all the transforms are GPU-side and the only real bottlenecks are depthtest and fillrate.

Could you make the concrete dust cloud as base, while on random specks the view open up to the collapsing building (rubble+glass particles) and little explosions? That way, every destruction would look
diffrent...

Realism does not always deliver the best results, especially at a audience that was over years trained to recognise as explosive realism hollywood sfx

it looks really cool...

if i had one criticism, it would be that the buildings appear to be undergoing a forced demolition (controlled explosions on every floor) so maybe if you could add more of a random element to the appearance and size of the smoke...

otherwise, BOOOOM!

Still doesn't feel 100% natural, but it looks awesome.
I especially like it when the roof of the building falls into the dust column.
Great work.

It really looks like a controlled demolition with every floor being rigged to explode simultaneously...

It looks nice, though it could be more random. Looks a bit too artificial atm.
Anyway, your shadows fail bad. As they fail for the trees and the bushes...

You know what I think would make it look a little less artificial? One or two huge explosions occurring on the periphery on the way down. Like something explosive inside the building just got crushed, shooting sparks out every which way.

True... Now it looks more like controlled demolition.

They aren't "my" shadows. They're just standard (broken!) Spring shadows.

maybe if some dust and debris would fall down before the main explosion it would look less artificial? i think c&c generals does that.
also laggy video is laggy.

Sorry ARGH rereading this thread made me realize how much like a bigBash session my coment looks, i apologize it is just, that something deep in the back of the brain seems not happy with the physiks it sees. When the building collapses, it does that level for level, meaning it gets faster every time, as the weight crashing the resistance from the concrete amounts over time, till the whole thing is getting down stable at about 7-8/m per second. Now we have air inside that collapsing building, beeing pressed out on the side (blowing out the glass-shards and concrete dust) and beeing compressed into the lower sections of the building.

Finally, the ironic thing is that the armed outside of the building is often remaining intact, collapsing onto the rubbleheap at the ground, so you can see remains of the buildings front (remember wtc)

My suggestion is, you make a simple cube, textured like the skyscraper, divided into five diffrent surfaces and shrink that thing with a simple animation into a maya pyramid like shape (a little twisting also helps the ilusion of surprise that something thought solid gets flexible- and just before the texture stretching gets to obvious you replace it in a cloud of dust and magic trickery with a heap of rubble.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=DRQ5I2NY

Video without particles

I know we are really spoild kids expecting you to deliver hollywood quality with limited ressources, but wouldnt you expect the same from us?