Here’s an animatic test of the phaser fire effect I whipped up for Decker’s attack on the planet killer.
And you thought I wasn’t working on this project. Tsk tsk tsk.
Decker's Revenge
Posts Tagged Enterprise
I’m sure everyone visiting this blog has seen this image before, but it’s new to me and in my considered opinion you can never have too many images of the Enterprise lying around.
Starship Enterprise 1960s studio model at Smithsonian Air and Space Museum
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Act II Scene 2 complete!
Dec 29
Ah, that’s better! I fixed the angle that the planet killer flies past the camera so that the viewer can now more clearly see the four component lances of the antiproton beam coalescing together, and I composited in the missing asteroid field and volumetric space dust layers that were missing from the previous test video.
This will not end well
I probably could spend another week or two endlessly tweaking this 66-frame sequence, but I think this is the best it’s going to get. It’s a shame, because there are a few things that have always bothered me about this particular sequence… more after the jump.
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Part 3 of 8 is now online–sort of. Let me explain, after the jump.
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.
Work continues apace on Act II. My next release will be everything up to the skirmish between the Enterprise and the planet killer, and I’ll also be re-releasing the video thus far on YouTube later this week.
Meanwhile, I’m going to do something I normally don’t do, and that’s to mix my personal blog with my professional life. Some of you may know that I work as a software engineer at Vovici Corporation, an enterprise feedback (read: survey) company based in Northern Virginia. Recently my colleague Jeffrey Henning—an opinion leader in enterprise survey feedback technologies and methodologies—wrote an excellent blogpost on the mini-rant I’m about to blast after the jump. If I can spread the word just a little bit to help nudge companies towards curbing what I feel is a particularly odious practice, I’ll have done my good deed for the day. :)
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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!
