I just added a new sequence (the collapse of an aqueduct) to my long time spare time project, a visualization of ancient Pergamum:
There are lots of issues with this scene (and the others too) but I will add some new scenes first and do some cleaning up at a later time.
If you want to follow this project you can do so on facebook or the project website, but I will also report here, once anything new will be worth mentioning.
http://pergamon.secondpage.de/index_en.html
Excellent.
too gray, try to add more interseting lighting. this kinda looks like an indie game witch i think is kinda cool 
keep working, i think this can turn out great!
Hi 2ndClemens
i agree EXCELLENT, so much work in that, what really stood out for me are the reliefs at 3:05, i would spend more time with the camera there. only crit i would have is that you maybe need to work on the textures in order to attain more realism. (if that is what you are going for)
great work, thoroughly enjoyed it.
shaun
shaun
Thanks Shaun, you’re right, I definitely plan to improve the textures. But also modeling, sculpting and rigging (of the lizard) need rework, and shouldn’t there be water pouring out of that broken aqueduct? 
Too much work, too little time, but since I have no deadline to meet, I can take my time with this.
Clemens
True, finalbarrage, this is very “economic” lighting, one sun and one Hemi, no reflections etc. to keep render times tolerable on my trusted first gen i7… It’s all blender internal rendering but that doesn’t excuse the somewhat flat lighting of course.
Really good! Can we have more details on the colapse?
Sure:
The aqueduct probably collapsed during an earthquake in the year 178 and was only partially rebuilt afterwards.
The stones are generated by a python script which took me quite some time to write and is not very clean… It generates the arches, filler stones and cover plates, assigns a random material and the rigid body animation based on the stones’ y-coordinates, so they don’t all collapse at once. There is also a driver on each stone for the wavy shake before the collapse.
The script ran almost 24 hours to generate the entire duct.
Afterwards I selected the parts that are not supposed to collapse and turned them to static and glued some chunks together with the rigid body tools.
The simulation then took another day to calculate.
The scene is not very responsive to work with and there are probably better ways to achieve better results.
The dust is done with smoke and some emitters that are manually placed. It could look better perhaps if I had given it more subdivisions.
Very impressive. 3d makes a great educational work here.
@ Kalinaki & Gleb
Thanks! 
Impressive! Very nice work!
I like very much the VR panoramas that can be found in your web site. Can you pls explain how did you create them?
Thx!
It’s pretty easy really. Just create 6 cameras in the same spot that look into each direction or one camera that looks into each direction over 6 frames. Render size must be sqare and field of view of the camera(s) 90°.
These images can then be displayed as a panorama by a panorama player.
The one I used (about 2 years ago) is deprecated by now, it still uses flash. http://pergamon.secondpage.de/panorama/
I also have a very basic fallback version for ipad but there are probably much better players by now.
Thanks a lot 2ndClemens!
The panorama player you used, even if deprecated, seems to still work quite well. Do you remember its name? I’ve tried some players found on the net but I’m quite unsatisfied.
It was called Panosalados. If you google it, you will find resources of version 2 that supports deep zooming but is a bit difficult to handle (at least I never got it working :-D)
On my website I used the simpler version 1.
At a certain point the developers site got hacked and infected by a virus, there was an uproar in the user community, the developers lost interest and so the project died.
I have attached the html/js/swf/fla files I used for the pergamon panos. Try extracting the folder and open index.html in your browser, if something happens. Maybe you can use it to get started.
the 6 square images are inside the “images_medium/images_01” folder.
It was MIT licensed so I guess it is okay to post it, the license files are included.
There’s a javascript that checks for ipads/iphones and opens the html5 fallback on these devices.
panorama.zip (2.77 MB)
search for Microsoft ICE, you will love it.
Yes, I looked into this a while ago. But a bit overkill for my humble low-res panos…
Very impressive! Did you add noise to the camera movements? Sometimes the video is kind of shaking not sure if this was intended or not.
Yes. That was supposed to give the impression of an earthquake that eventually brings down the aqueduct. The trees are also slightly starting to shake and the duct itself shakes in a sine-wave. But I admit that it is not as convincing as I had hoped…
Alright! Actually i watched the video without the sound (I was surprised when the aqueduct collapsed)… I need to check that again
WOW! Thanks a lot for sharing 2ndClemens!!
I works fine!
