Part 3 of 8 is now online–sort of. Let me explain, after the jump.
Archive for category The Doomsday Machine
Here’s a little work in progress image from Act II. Don’t worry; the lens flares will be toned down for the final animation.
The Enterprise is about to have a very bad day
Part 2 of 8 now back online!
Dec 10
Part 2 of 8 has been posted at YouTube! You can thank my chronic insomnia for the much sooner-than-anticipated completion of the new viewscreen insert.
Onward with Act II!
Part 1 of what I project will be eight parts has been posted at YouTube! Since I revised the appearance of the planet killer somewhat for its debut in Act II, I have to re-render the viewscreen inserts from the end of Act I before I can post part 2 of 8… hopefully that will be completed in the next week or so.
And yes, I plastered a permanent “watermark” copyright on all of the live action footage from 1967. My intent here (indeed, my intent all along) is not to steal from Paramount/CBS Video or deprive them of a DVD sale. The original footage is posted merely to present my revised effects in the context of the original episode–nothing more. Hopefully, the constant watermark won’t be too annoying, but I feel that it’s necessary. ‘Nuff said.
M’kay, an update on Act II. For the past two months I’ve been tweaking the textures on my models but I’ve also been trying to get that darn twenty-second opening shot from Act II looking the way I want it to. This is what happens when you’re self-taught… sometimes you run into the limitations of what you’ve taught yourself, and what I ran into was my inability to make it look like the Enterprise really was flying through the debris field as she desperately evaded the planet killer. After many false starts I think I’ve finally got it right… at least it looked good on the animatic! Learning how to make a model follow a curve and fiddling with matching the banking and pitching to the ship’s movements really helped a lot… here’s a frame grab from the final product which is rendering right now:
Sulu, stop texting and pay attention to your flying!
Incidentally, sometimes being as slow as molasses has its advantages… I’ve been dilly-dallying so long that technology has finally caught up and Newtek has (in the LightWave 9.6.1 beta) FINALLY fixed a very annoying bug that was causing about half of the asteroids in my asteroid fields to disappear. I’ve been using LightWave 8.5 ever since I discovered the bug but was really disappointed at having to lose some of the nice fractal procedurals when I reverted. This scene is being rendered in 9.6.1, so I have all of my nicer textures back.
So anyway, that’s where things stand now. Right now the four computers in my mini render farm are about halfway through the third concentric shell of asteroids* in my seven-layer asteroid field, so there’s still a good day or so of rendering left on that. Once that’s done I will have some final adjustments to make on the new planet killer model, and then I’ll let that scene element rip. The new translucent skin really brings the PK model alive but dang it slows down the render times. Don’t look for the opening of Act II until this time next week, is what I’m currently guessing.
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* – Asteroid shells, you ask? Think of the asteroid shells as those nesting Russian toys, one spherical layer of asteroids nested inside another. Each shell has 2,000 asteroids, with seven layers altogether, so there are 14,000 asteroids in every scene (although you will almost never see all of them in one scene unless the camera does a LOT of panning!). The layers are different thicknesses to keep the overall density of the background rocks relatively even throughout the asteroid field. BTW, in case you’re curious, here’s all of the LightWave scenes that go into a typical scene:
- Foreground hero asteroids
- The Enterprise
- The Constellation (but not in this sequence!)
- Background hero asteroids
- The planet killer
- Background asteroid shell #1
- Background asteroid shell #2
- Background asteroid shell #3
- Background asteroid shell #4
- Background asteroid shell #5
- Background asteroid shell #6
- Background asteroid shell #7
- Volumetric haze (crap but this one take forever to render!)
- Starscape
Thank goodness Newtek fixed that scene bug that was causing half the asteroid objects in my seven asteroid shell scenes to disappear… copying the camera movements from LightWave 9.6 (where everything else was being done) to LightWave 8.5 was a royal pain, and made me really appreciate the “Load items from scene” feature even more! So if you were wondering why it takes me so long to set up and grind out just one scene, now you know!
Gee thanks, Yahoo!
Oct 19
Yahoo Small Business Hosting is great, but sometimes they do stuff that really pisses me off. Apparently they recently upgraded my WordPress blogware, which is nice (all kinds of new features to play with and much-needed security features), but it also apparently destroyed my custom theme, which is bad. 
So, welcome to a plain new theme until I can find the time to customize this one (oh yeah… and this time save the frickin’ customizations locally!)
Part of the reason I didn’t notice the problem until now (I think it’s been this way for at least a week!) is that I’ve been busy at my workstation madly experimenting with the FINAL tweaks to the planet killer. Sneak peek:
Planet Killer 3.0, now with translucent evilness
I am bemused…
Sep 24
…to note that if you enter the search terms
doomsday machine
in Google, I don’t pop up until page 7 on the Web tab, page 5 on the Images tab and page 2 of the Videos. But if you enter
doomsday machine constellation
I suddenly jump to fourth place on the Web tab and the runner-up spot in Images (but am a no-show on the Videos… fooey).
Second place? Hmmph... you're #1 in my book
I guess there’s still some life in the old girl yet! 
Act II Scene 1 WIP
Sep 21
OK, so you’ve probably noticed that August 31st came and went with no Act II. Unfortunately, a combination of real life and a dissatisfaction with the appearance of the planet killer have indefinitely delayed Act II until sometime in October. This will of course put the whole project deadline in jeopardy, but hey, a guy has to earn a living and sleep now and then!
Run away! Run away!
To tide you over in the meantime, I’m going to do something I don’t normally do and share one of my “rejects” with you. Follow the link below to watch the opening scene from Act II when the Enterprise is fleeing the planet killer:
Decompress the zip file and watch the movie on your local workstation–easy peasy!
There are some things I like about this scene (mostly, the POV jump—I was going for a 1960′s-style camera pullback here and I think that it works pretty good, but I’m all ears for your comments!), and a laundry list of things that I don’t (the too-procedural appearance of the planet killer, a goof with compositing the “fire” effects of the PK, the motion of the Enterprise as she swoops through the debris field, the asteroid that looks like a giant wadded ball of bubblegum, etc., etc.) Better luck next time!
A slightly different light source angle here that hints at a couple of subtle (and not-so-subtle) changes that I’ve snuck into the model.
Does this mesh make me look fat?