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.”
Category Archives: Babylon 5
100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 30
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.
100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 24
“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…
Hyperspace / Quantum Space Environment
“Hyperspace” for Lightwave 3D, released August 25, 2016 – 0.7 MB
Based on the “quantum space” environment seen in Babylon 5: The Lost Tales, this archive includes both the blue-colored quantum space as well as the original red-tinted hyperspace of Babylon 5.
100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 18
As promised, with a few modifications, quantum space has become hyperspace. Aside from recoloring from blue to red, I made the bright bands pulsing from one end of the environment to the other more subtle, and added proxy objects and lights to represent the “lightning flashes” that were present in the Babylon 5 version of hyperspace.
100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 17
More quantum space today. The real meat is in this tiny test-rendered animation. I think I’ve just about nailed the animation and arrangement, and even that weird ring-thing. The scene lighting is a bit trickier to get down, but that’s true for any sort of hyperspace-style environment like this that doesn’t have traditional light-sources or, potentially, laws of physics. I have a feeling rendering in passes and generous amounts of post-processing effects will make it look suitably surreal and alternate-dimension-y.
Next up will be adjusting it to match the red-colored look of Babylon 5’s original hyperspace, and then I can put this one in the books.
100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 16
I recently mentioned wanting to attack “quantum space” from the most recent Babylon 5 production, “The Lost Tales.” Quantum space was a faster version of hyperspace. From what I remember hearing, it was actually a late addition to the script, so the quantum space effect was just the updated B5 hyperspace environment Atmosphere Visual Effects was already building, recolored from red to blue. I’m taking TLT as a sort of baseline style guide from my Babylon 5 project, so if I want a hyperspace model that reflects the most recent look of it, then I’ll need to emulate the TLT effect.
100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 14
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.
100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 12
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.
100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 10
A quick-ish Babylon 5 shot. In direct defiance of my experiments a few days ago, the many fighters on-screen were not instances (I would’ve had more if they were), but were loaded in from a very old scene and hand-arranged. The trouble is, each model contained multiple objects and lights, which as far as I know doesn’t play nicely with instancing. I could’ve created single-object versions of them specifically to be instanced into large squadrons, but who has that kind of time? Not me, not anymore.
Perhaps when this is all over I’ll try to settle on to a one-render-a-week schedule so I can remain fresh while still allowing myself time to do other 3D stuff that doesn’t go directly on the screen. Not to say I regret doing this, I’m really happy about having so much new output to look at and build on (I’ve probably already exceeded the previous five years combined).
There’s another interesting thing I don’t have time to investigate. I tried to create a dolly-zoom effect so there’d be a lot of radial motion blur to create a feeling of acceleration, but it didn’t come out with any visible blur at all. I’m not sure why, but it’s something to put a pin in and revisit later on.