At the urging of Rhys over at Foundation3D, yesterday I finally figured out how to adapt my workflow to use linear color.

There are many explanations on-line for what a linear workflow entails. It’s fairly technical, but the upshot is that computers have to mess with images to get them to look right. That’s great, except when you process those images, say by using them as texture maps in a 3D rendering calculation. All of the renderer’s math is thrown off, because it’s using source data that was filtered for display, and things come out looking wrong. Everything is wrong!

Continue reading →

Hey, I made it a whole month! How about that.

After the Babylon 4 picture yesterday, I felt like continuing the theme. This one is actually based on a specific shot from Babylon 5’s season 3 finale, “Z’ha’dum.”

Continue reading →

As I was working on my Star Trek 50th Anniversary picture last night, I wanted a quicker set-up for today’s render. Luckily, The Audio Guide to Babylon 5 dropped their episode on War Without End last night, giving me a fine bit of inspiration.

I’ve been avoiding images of Babylon 4 (and 5) since those models are older, and it’s easier to make more flattering images with more up-to-date models. Only one of the models in this image even has a self-lighting rig. Still, it gives me a foundation I might revisit later in the future.

I also tried my hand at the Shadow’s “phasing” effect, similar to the classic Star Trek cloaking device. I’m fairly sure the original show did the effect in 3D, but I haven’t had a lot of success with it when I’ve tried. More experimentation will be required.

“If something living in hyperspace bothers you…good, it should.”

One of the things I want to do with my Babylon 5 project is hide the Shadow ships for as long as possible. I’m not sure when your first good look at one should be, but I think the shape and size of them should be less clear than it was in the first part of the show. They were referred to as “shadows” for a reason, after all.

This was an experiment in this philosophy. I nestled the Shadow ship up against one of the dark gaps in the hyperspace environment, and used a depth map to submerge it within the clouds. It makes it harder to tell where the ship ends and hyperspace begins, which was my goal.

And little Warren Keffer’s Starfury cruises by, unaware of what’s lurking out of sight…

I was a little burned out from yesterday’s fairly elaborate image, so I went for something easy today. There is a little bit of future-proofing involved; the composition is based on a stock shot used in the Babylon 5 episode “Points of Departure.” I didn’t duplicate the animation, but it’ll give me a start whenever I come to that shot in my other project.

Another simple shot today. I wanted to experiment with a very wide-angle lens.

I’m finding that stars are tricky in 5K. In reality, stars are so distant they may as well be single points, but they’re also bright enough that if they show up at all in a photograph, they’ll “bloom” outside of a single pixel. I don’t like having well-defined, circular stars (which I do my best to blur), but if I kept them down to a pixel or two in size, they wouldn’t resolve at all on most screens, between conventional resolutions and low dynamic range. Perhaps, on an HDR display, the most accurate-looking stars would be super-bright single pixels (though on such a display, you also wouldn’t need post-processed bloom, since the image would be exactly as bright as it would be in reality, so the viewer’s eye would naturally see bright objects as having glare).

Of course, in reality, you wouldn’t be able to see a single star in a photo like this, though from what I’ve read from astronauts, a few stars actually are visible to the human eye even when looking objects lit by the sun.

Deep thoughts.