TOS Cylon Basestar Montage

Posted on by

Since I hadn’t done much in Lightwave for the past few months and have the chance again with the successful end of my creativity-sapping traditional drawing course, I decided to try out an animation. I wanted something reasonably simple to warm up, so I did a series of four drifty shots of Raffs’ Basestar, assembling them into a montage like the ones used for establishing shots of Basestars in season 3 and 4 of the new Galactica.

It also gave me the chance to try out Premiere and After Effects, as well as being my first try at faking radiosity with a spinning light globe and rendering to OpenEXR. I was going to try using Screamernet to set up a little render farm since I have access to more than one computer for the time being, but since it was apparently designed by sadists for sadists, I found it was easier just to grab my dongle, start up Layout on each computer, and set each machine to render a different range of frames.

I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

How I used Lightwave’s Hypervoxels in “Bombardment”

Posted on by

For the vapor trails, I created a null and parented it to the shell (which I had already animated at its speed), and under the “Dynamics” tab of object properties added the “Emitter” FX. Under Generator I set a birth rate of 300 particles per second (the exact number depends on how fast your object is moving. You want enough so the trail isn’t a gap-filled dotted line, but not so many it’s just an opaque mess. Whether it’s measured by second or frame doesn’t seem to make a difference in how it behaves beyond the obvious, though I’m not sure how particles per “speed,” “collision,” or “wind” work).

The generator size is fairly self explanatory. Make it big enough to fill whatever the trail is coming out of, but not so big particles are appearing outside it in empty space. Particle limit controls when your emitter stops emitting, and start frame when it starts. Interestingly enough, two particle emitters with the exact same settings will spawn particles in exactly the same way. If you have, say, a multiengine airplane, it’s extremely apparent when it has identical vaportrails coming out of each engine, so you’ll want to have each emitter have a different start time.

Under the Particle pane, the only interesting thing is “Life Time(frame).” This way, you can set when old particles disappear and stop using up your valuable memory. I set it to 300 frames, +/- 0. Everything else should be set to 0, as well.

In Motion, “Velocity” should be 100%. I set “Explosion” to 5 m/s, so the particles would expand as the trail aged. I set “Vibration” to 5 m/s as well, so the trail would have a bit more life and randomness to it, instead of expanding uniformly.

Under the descriptively named Etc tab, I set “Position Blur” to 100, so the particles wouldn’t appear in neat little discrete clusters but smoothly along the trail, and “Parent motion” to .5% so the trail would ever-so-slightly follow the shell it was coming off of. For a rocket exhaust, I’d set this to a negative value. For an explosion, I’d set it to 100%.

And that’s the end of the particle settings.

After enabling hypervoxels, and activating my emitter null as a hypervoxel object, I set the object type to “Sprite” (“Volume” takes too long to render, and “Surface” is just a big blob). For “Dissolve,” I went into the texture control and created a gradient with “Particle Age” as the Input Parameter. I set it so the dissolve would be at 0% at 0 frames old, and 100% at 300 frames old (at which point, the particle emitter would remove the particle from the scene, clearing a space for a new particle to be created. It’s very “circle of life.”) Particle size was set to 7 m, and likewise had a Particle Age gradient so it would get bigger in time, maintaining the integrity of the trail even as the particles drifted apart from each other. One of the key things to remember is that each particle is just a little fuzzy procedural-textured circle, but as long as they overlap, they look like natural, organic clouds. Lift them drift apart, though, and the illusion is shattered.

“Shading” had every single channel described with a particle age gradient. “Color” had it start off the same yellow as the shell object, to represent its glow and flames, but faded to smoke gray within a few frames. “Luminosity” is, first of all, not actually equivalent to “Luminosity” in Lightwave’s surfacing system. It corresponds to the diffusion channel, a concept that gave me a bit of trouble before I figured out what was going on in my test renders. Likewise, the luminosity was set very high for the first few frames, and went downward gradually after that. “Opacity” seems to correspond to “Transparency” and “Density” to “Translucency” in the Surface Panel, but in reverse. So a perfectly clear object would have 100% transparency, but 0% Opacity.

I don’t know why the Hypervoxels shading panel doesn’t adhere to the conventions of the Lightwave surface editor but, then, I didn’t design that damn thing, and it seems to work well enough once you figure it out.

The shading panel also gives you the option to pick two lights that will be used on your hypervoxels, or to check a box to “Use All Lights.” To save render times, each vapor trail had the main sun light and its corresponding shell light selected. “Use All Lights” isn’t too bad for stuff like vapor trail, but a big smoke cloud in the middle of lots of lights like in this shot will kill your render times if you have “Use All Lights” turned on.

Hypertexture should be “Turbulence,” tuned to your standards of fuzzy cloudiness. Feel free to experiment on this. I certainly didn’t.

That’s about all I have to say without going so far as to offer a formal tutorial. Clear as mud, right? Maybe I should put the scene and object up for download, and you can look at it yourself.

Puddle Jumper Showcase

Posted on by

Renders of the Puddle Jumper and Drone models.

Movie:

– Deployment and retraction of the Jumper’s drone bays and engine pods

 

Images:

 

Download Page

Kicking Toasters In The New Old-Fashioned Way

Posted on by

So, here we have my next step in the wide world of explosions, from the explosion-and-smoke-filled universe of the new Battlestar Galactica using Raffs’ excellent Cylon Basestar. Rendered in Lightwave, with all of the effects done in-camera (so to speak) with particles and hypervoxels.

The picture actually started life some four weeks ago. It was originally going to be poster-sized, with three Basestars in various states of explosion. As time went on and I continued to finesse the shells and fireballs, I slowly found myself losing interest. Rather than dropping the picture, I repurposed it, changing the framing and reducing the image size to my old standby, losing one of the Basestars, and having only a little bit of explosion in the hopes it would finish rendering before I completed my higher education. I gave it a once-over in Photoshop to add some bloom and improve the color of it, along with a pass of film grain (followed by a .5 pixel gaussian blur, so the film grain actually looked like film grain and not weird pixelated distortion).

I considered having some missiles coming out of the Basestars, but decided against it because, like I said, I wanted to be done. I’ll make a missile setup later, in all likelihood.

The backstory to the image is that it’s from the battle in the flashback sequence of “Battlestar Galactica: Razor.” While the Cylons were focusing on the Battlestar Columbia, the other two Battlestars had the chance to switch from defensive to offensive fire, and this is their first salvo headed for the Cylon Basestars. The quote is something that will later be said by what these Cylons were fighting to the death to protect.

Last Call

Posted on by

My first Doctor Who picture is inspired by the finale of the second season, wherein the Doctor parks his TARDIS next to a supernova so he can have enough power to say a final farewell to his companion, Rose Tyler.

I briefly worried that using an actual 3D model of a rose as the basis for the fire of the nova would be a bit too on-the-nose, but it ended up being nearly impossible to tell what it was originally, anyway, even when you know what to look for.

Saturn, Saturn, and More Saturn!

Posted on by

I recently realized that I’d been putting off making a scene of Saturn, even though I knew what I had to do to make it work. Seizing the opportunity to do some work in Layout again, I made a scale reproduction of Saturn, it’s rings, and five or six moons (the ones I found good maps for). I’ve already made similar set-ups for Jupiter and Earth. While I was working on it, I came up with ideas for three pictures using it, so here they are.

“Gossamer” is just a beauty shot of the planet.

 

“Take Us Out” is a Star Trek picture that’s something of a riff on the end of the computer game “Starfleet Academy,” where the Enterprise-A is seen in drydock around Saturn.

 

“Ouroboros” is a Stargate SG-1 picture, based off the first season cliffhanger. I felt like the the picture needed a quote, but I couldn’t think of anything specific, so I searched Google for quotes relating to the word “serpent” until I found something that was apropos to the situation.

Well, it’s a “ship” that goes through the “gate,” so we’ll call it…

Posted on by

…a puddle jumper!

Front view

Rear view

Now that the modeling of the exterior is finished, I believe I have enough invested in it to start up the WIP thread. I’ve started on texturing, and I believe I have a good base for the hull texture above. I’m painting alpha maps for it so the mottling isn’t so uniform. I already finished animating the unfolding of the engines, though I’ll need to work out a new way to clip the objects so they don’t show up inside the cabin of the ship when they’re retracted. The method I’m using now only works when the ship is pointed along the Z-axis.

Also, I’ve finished texturing on the drone weapons, complete with a low-detail version for those scenes when you have thousands of the things flying every which way.

Drone Showcase

Active Drone

—

Added July 22, 2007

I’ve finished texturing and the light set-up on the exterior. I’m going to try to figure out how to get this clip-mapping fixed, though. Being able to only point the ship in one direction is a bit limiting for cinematography. After I’ve gotten that done (or given up in hopes of figuring it out later), I’ll get back to modeling the interior.

Also, I’ve rigged the engines so I can throttle their brightness with one slider. In fact, with the complicated retractions this ship does, I have to say, sliders and Master Channels are an absolute Godsend.

Front

Bottom

Rear

—

Added July 23, 2007

As for the engines on the Jumper, those are a magical wonderland of cheating. The engine bays on the original are about twice as deep as mine (the reason the bays on my model are shallower is so the rear compartment fits in at something close to its actual proportions), so the actual engines fit in with a bit less of a problem. However, it seems clear that the pivot they rest upon jumps off of its track while it’s retracting, so the engines can point straight up. Also, the wings themselves just pull into the body, without any sort of fake compartment or rationalization as to how they could possibly fit into the ship. Part of the fun of making this model was realizing exactly what compromises were made in its design, right after I made the same ones and thus knew what to look for.

The best look at how the engines retract (and how the VFX artists hide the fact that its physically impossible for them to move the way they do) come in the opening shot of the episode “Trinity,” and in a number of shots in “38 Minutes” (thought the best angles from those episodes aren’t included in those caps).

Seriously, after reverse-engineering this whole thing, I’m thinking about doing a writeup on the Jumper, mostly a taxonomy of the 3+ distinct 3D models of done on the show.

Here’s a movie of the cycles for the drone and engine bays. I’ve already decided I’ll take a page from the Atlantis VFX teams and only show the engines unfolding while the ship is distant, in motion, in shadow, or all three.

The same movie as above, but with the main body of the ship hidden so you can see precisely how the engines have to be clipped out so they don’t show up inside the cabin.

Serenity Liftoff

Posted on by

Now, this picture was an interesting one for me to make, since I tried a few new things. The contrails were a first for me, and I’m happy with how they turned out. The heat ripples coming out of Serenity’s engines also worked well. After a little polishing in Photoshop so the rendered elements blended in with the photographed stuff, I’m ready to call it done.