Revisiting an older image.

Over the weekend, I’ve had the privilege of beta-testing Ted Harrison’s new Babylon 5 model. This million-poly behemoth causes my poor old computer to struggle mightily under its weight, but I think I can get a couple pictures out of it.¹I’m planning to upgrade to more-or-less the same computer I use at work soon, so I tried loading the model up at the office. Interestingly, OpenGL previews were almost as bad as on my ancient laptop, but VIPER was ridiculously snappy. I’m not sure whether that’s Apple’s or Newtek’s fault. It’s certainly not great that there are no gizmos in VIPER, so I can’t really work in it, though I suppose I could switch to a multi-window viewport. To see how it would respond under real-world conditions, I loaded it into one of my favorite images of Babylon 5, one that I made shortly after the first teaser screencap of “The Lost Tales” came out, which was itself a recreation of a scene from the B5 series finale, “Sleeping In Light.”

Unfortunately, in my haste, I made a boatload of mistakes, guaranteeing there’d be a third version of the image. First, while I replaced Babylon 5, the nebula, the planet, and the Minbari Warcruiser with my current go-to models, I forgot to recalibrate the lighting nebula lighting for Linear Color model, so the image ended up with a pronounced navy blue cast. I also forgot to kill the glows on Babylon 5, so it doesn’t look quite as shut-down as it should. And I got the angle of rotation backwards.