Much like the defiant squadron-leader Sinclair, I’m also shouting “Not like this!”
Metaphorically.
At the prospect of missing a day.
Photo finish!
This is actually a test of some of the ideas I had when building my Battle of the Line analysis. This lays out the scene based on being consistent with the live action footage (Delenn looking up at Sinclair’s fighter in the hologram chamber, and Sinclair passing into the cruiser’s shadow just before impact).
I have no idea who made this Psi-Corps Mothership, and Google was unhelpful.
Oddly, the Hyperspace effect I made a little while ago doesn’t emit significant light when in linear color mode. It’s odd because LCS usually makes radiosity and such much brighter. Though it just occurred to me that since Hyperspace is an alternate dimension, I could render it using old-style settings and just say that that’s just the way physics works in that realm. Yes, I like that idea.
Edited 2016-10-18: A.Kurin at F3D has reminded me that the Psi-Corps Mothership is by Marc-Laurent Magnier. Thanks!
I’m going to admit, I was tired and in a hurry when I laid this out. I was going for a contrast in size, but it doesn’t really read. Looking back, I probably should’ve gone with an angle along the length of the Vorlon ship, with more perspective.
By popular request, a shot of the Enterprise-E during the Dominion War.
As the U.S.S. Sisyphus loses power in the face of the… cube? Higher dimensional structure? Viewscreen test pattern?… Captain Baxter realizes that it’s going to be one of those days.
I thought a picture inspired by the Improvised Star Trek would be fun, and give me a chance to do something slightly off-beat. I had a brain-fart when I was setting up the image, and misaligned the cube, so it’s not quite a real Belvedere Cube. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to model a Squircle.
I have no idea why the glow textures for the model didn’t apply, prompted the unplanned energy drain on the ship. Everything looked correct in the settings, but, hey, conversions are weird.
Okay, one more jumppoint. The Drakh shot from the other day was going to be this scene, but I changed my mind before I was sure that something I did to the jumppoint made Lightwave hang when I loaded other scenes into a scene it was already in. And then since I already did my original angle, I made it a square.
I could probably easily spend another week working on this jumppoint, putting it into real scenes and realizing things I missed (there’s a reason none of the points in this shot are in front of the planet), and then doing it all again until I’m satisfied. And there’s got to be some way to do that transparent-from-the-sides effect in-camera…
90% of the way there on that jumppoint. Well, 90%, plus the recolor-jobs, and I’ll probably tweak the animation timing again. And again. And again…
The most pressing thing to fix, though, is the shape. At times in Babylon 5 and Crusade, the jump point vortex appeared to be tapered, rather than a straight-edged cone. It was definitely the case in “The Lost Tales.” I attempted to replicate that by modifying Yuri’s model, but I think I might’ve blown my order-of-operations (it’s a little bit more complicated to change than you’d think because this version of the vortex is a multi-part model).
Still, I might just be able to run off the picture I planned for Sunday tonight. Though Lightwave got oddly temperamental about loading more stuff in with this newly-modified scene setup. I’m hoping it was just a freak arrangement of factors, though I can’t ignore the age of my computer being a contributing factor. I feel like I’m coaxing an old jalopy at this point. Just needs to hold on for a little longer…
I spent most of yesterday fiddling with Yuri Parovin’s A-Call-to-Arms-style jumppoint. While Lightwave makes most of the conversion for working in linear color fairly brainless, surfaces that are driven in greyscale any don’t need to be gamma-corrected don’t react well. This is simple enough to fix for image maps, but it’s more complicated with procedural textures, and the result that the model came out looking funny. I also wanted to adjust the timing of the animation effects. I ended up with something that looked good in a still, but didn’t animate well. I’ll keep working on it today, I think I’m most of the way there.
Still, it ended up being very late, and I had nothing ready for today, so I cast about for an idea, and came up with a stock Babylon 5 shot of a Minbari Flyer approaching the Gray Council’s cruiser. I’d already prepared a version of the ship when I added the rib lights to Rhys Salcombe’s model (it’s the green running lights that distinguish it), so it was quick one to put together.
More adventures in bokeh today. All post-processed (who has the time to produce 3D-rendered depth of field on the daily? Though I am curious about how it might turn out for backgrounds and not just fun effects on small objects). In this case, I rendered each object seperately, and then applied different amounts of blur to each layer in Photoshop. It’s pretty effective, though probably not physically accurate, considering I eyeballed how out-of-focus each object should be.
I originally thought of setting the Daleks into my model-exhibiting cove, since the background would be out-of-focus anyway, but then I realized the Babylon 5 docking bay would be much more visually interesting, and barely recognizable as being from the wrong show considering the angle and the degree of blur on it. That was the right choice.
Edited 2016-10-09: I realized after posting this that I forgot to take anamorphic distortion into account when I blurred this image. I’ve replaced the top of the page with a corrected version. Here’s the first version.
