A while ago, I made a set of icons for the DRADIS displays from the new Battlestar Galactica. Another artist contributed a recreation of the actual monitors, and I built on both to make computer screens for some cutscenes in the fan-made BSG video game, Diaspora. I figure sooner or later, I’ll probably need some more BSG computer screens using the design language from the Pegasus, rather than the Galactica. I’ve had some spare time recently, so I decided to recreate the DRADIS screens from the Pegasus.
I’m not very familiar with Adobe Illustration, so I made the screens in Photoshop (at double the final size), modeled and animated the scan sweeps and fields in Lightwave, and layered together the animated version in After Effects.
The fonts are just close enough (finding precise font matches is really hard, and even more so for pixel-style fonts. I’m not even sure this one was a pixel-style font; I think it used real diagonals, but the straight lines were pixel-proportioned), and the 3D sweep animation doesn’t look entirely correct, but that version of the screen was only shown close-up in one episode, and it was usually overlaid with static, so there’s not enough information for me to figure out what I’m not understanding about the animation.