As promised, with a few modifications, quantum space has become hyperspace. Aside from recoloring from blue to red, I made the bright bands pulsing from one end of the environment to the other more subtle, and added proxy objects and lights to represent the “lightning flashes” that were present in the Babylon 5 version of hyperspace.

I also made hyperspace-version of Yuri Parovin’s “A Call to Arms”-style jumppoint. I don’t particularly care to go into a full taxonomy of jump-point design in the Babylon 5 sequel series, Crusade. The short version is, a very cool-looking and elaborate version of the jump point was made for the pilot movie of the show, “A Call to Arms.” During most of the series, it was either lost or proved too expensive to use on a day-to-day basis, and was often replaced by the old-style jumppoints with one quick modification to make them look more like the new version. In B5, jump points in hyperspace were always red (as opposed to in normal space, where ones going out to hyperspace were green and ones coming in from hyperspace were blue), but in Crusade, only the outbound-jumppoint was recolored. Inbound jumppoints in Hyperspace just used the regular green model.

All of which is a long walk around to say that I based the composition of this shot on one from a Crusade episode, “The Needs of Earth.” I don’t have a model of the ship-of-the-week that appeared in the episode, so I substituted Centauri ships.

The jumppoint model I’m using doesn’t quite blend smoothly when seen from the side, and I’m not sure if there’s an easier way to get the invisible-from-the-side effect than compositing trickery. I’ll probably give it some TLC when I’m done with the 100 days. It’s hard enough to spend time on a primarily-animated project like these hyperspace environments when I don’t have the computer power to render a decent animation in a single day.

I’ll package up the hyperspace and quantum space environments for download later today.