So I started fooling around with 3ds max and rayfire a while ago, and I managed to produce this: http://www.youtube.c...h?v=MKUkX93rRn4

Any critiques?

Why was it rendered at 480 fps? Seems like an odd choice especially for the 30 hour render cost. Seems like for that quality it would take a lot less time.

Other than that it looked very realistic.

I rendered it at such high frame rates to get everything really slow without having to interpolate pixels, which can end badly. My other projects take a lot shorter to render because they don't have as many reflection/refraction calculations that need to be done.

 Hi Sepiantum. I don't particularly like the way the sphere completely stops before breaking up. It's falling strong, then as soon as it touches the ground it becomes still - I think it should continue to go down and that 'going down' motion is what causes the compression that breaks it from bottom up. So while it's breaking, its top part is still moving down (and never stops actually, it keeps going down until the breaking separates the top part from the rest of the body as a smaller, unbreakable piece).

At the moment of breaking you can also see a change in color - from a transparent, glassy sphere (the material looks fine btw), you have it become gray or smokey. I'd rather it kept transparent all the way.

I never simulated it at 480 fps, and I scaled it down from 30 to 480, so I'm guessing the keyframes got a bit messed up. It looks fine with 30 fps. And when it hits... I have no idea what happened to that. I think that having so many fragments screwed stuff up.

You followed Andrew Kramer's tutorial on videocopilot. Your result is exactly what he gets. Maybe you should mention that.

http://www.videocopi...s/epic_shatter/

In the light of that, I don't know what to tell you. You followed the tutorial well, it looks good, it's a nice effect. Now try creating your own versions of it, maybe a drinking glass instead of a sphere?

Oh look you noticed. I'll link that and give credits.