You don’t even want to know what the installation cost was for this thing

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While I have done a few experiments with compositing, this is probably my most ambitious effor. In case you’re wondering, that is my back yard (currently, and delightfully, hurricane free), with my new Stargate model placed in it. Perhaps SG-1 could come through that ‘gate some time. A nice, (if slightly overdeveloped) piece of the subtropics would certainly relieve the monotony of all those pine-tree planets.

Now all I need is a real one to put back there, to see how close I was to reality.

I did the compositing in Lightwave. I set it up to do that thing where it makes an alpha map for the ground stand-in based on the amount of shadows, just in case. I only have Photoshop Elements (which happens to be missing the Element of alpha channels), but I was able to use a copy on one of the computers at school to make a transparent image of the ring and its shadow, so all that remains is to reintegrate it into my original background and tweak it up a bit.

Another thing I noticed was that on the school PC’s monitor, the blue cast (caused by the light I used to simulate the glow of the sky) on the ground object (and the devision between it and the real background) was a lot more noticeable, and the shadow of the ring was a lot lighter. So while I’m most concerned with getting it to look right on my Mac, I may have to see if I can steal some more time at school to find a happy medium.

I rerendered the scene with a slightly modified ‘gate model (fixing a spot of missing detail on the back and adding a more accurate bit of detail to the inside surface, where the event horizon sits), and a slightly modified lighting scheme (I tried throwing a little more specular on it from the sun, but found the only way to get even a little to show was to have the light point straight down, which wouldn’t have fit in with the shadows all that well). I then recomposited the ‘gate in Photoshop, getting rid of the blue cast on my front-projection polygon. Only problem that remains is that the bump mapping in the chevron wells is having some kind of difficulty, causing the background to shine through as if it were partially transparent there. I’ve no idea how or why, and it doesn’t show up on the alpha map of the image.

In summery, I think it would’ve been far easier to go to Canada, steal the prop, and instal it in my driveway, then say it was a comp-job when I posted the pictures of it. It would also be endless fun at parties.

 

 

Stargate 1.0 Making-Of

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Well, after getting royally hooked on Stargate SG-1 (and now Stargate Atlantis) over the summer, I remembered an old tutorial on how to model a Stargate. After tracking it down, I began the process of building my own as part of my initiation into Lightwave modeler. While it’s not quite finished as yet, I think I’ve gotten as far as I can by my wits alone, so this post is part “Hey, look at this cool thing I just did,” and part, “Can anyone help me? Please?”

Anyway, the pictures:

Untextured:

Front
Back
Close-up

Textured
Front (Chevrons off)
Front (Chevrons on)
Rear
Front close-up (Chevrons off)
Front close-up (Chevrons on)
Rear close-up

The ‘gate is fully animatable (and, after testing this baby out and finding how tedious animating the dialing sequence is, I’m going to be pulling out my trusty copy of Inside Lightwave [6] to see about some way to automate the process), and I’m inordinately proud of how the texturing turned out. Also, though none of the pictures here show it, I made three alternate spinning rings with different point-of-origin symbols. For the nit-pickers, I even accidentally added no less than three minor errors to find and bug me with. And I have no intention of fixing them, unless and until I make a version 2.0. And since I’m not even finished with this one yet, that’s a ways away.

And, now for the part that everyone’s been waiting for, the obligatory “Begging for help from the learned elders” portion of the post.

One: There’s a pattern of groves in the texturing of the original Stargate. I’m kind of at a loss as to how to paint proper-looking bump maps with good-looking semi-circles and randomly-connecting lines.

Two: I’m not entirely happy with the chevron glows, especially on the big light that isn’t actually a chevron but is part of the whole chevron-unit. It looks less like a clear thing with a light inside (which it should), and more like an opaque thing with a quickly-painted glow map on it (which it is). I’d really appreciate any ideas on how to reverse that little equation.

Three: The event-horizon. That damnable puddle. I can’t even get the pattern of ripples on the surface to look right, much less the blinding while patterns in the center. Everything I find on the internet says “Make a ripple procedural in the bump channel and point a spotlight at it.” Well, apparently, either I’m stupid or it isn’t that simple. This is the part I’m really interested in help on.

And, that’s it. Well, not quite. I took advantage of quite a few places on-line to get as far as I did, and I’d like to provide a little acknowledgment so I can sleep soundly tonight.

First off, to Ed Giddings, for his years-old tutorial that got me started, and the extremely high-quality renders of his own (far more up-to-date) Stargate clone. Honestly, it was some of the best reference material I could find.

Secondly, to the maker of the Stargate Glyph Font. In-freaking-valuable to my making the glyphs on the inner ring, and a pretty neat font in its own right.

Also, to the dedicated minds behind the Richard Dean Anderson Website, specifically the section dedicated to Stargate glyphs. In addition to providing reference for two other point-of-origin symbols, the bank of Stargate addresses allowed me to successfully attempt my dialing-sequence test (which, in retrospect, might not be such a good thing, given how tedious it was to animate. ).

And, finally, to the kind souls who put up the opening sequences for SG-1 and Atlantis on-line. Like I said, reference was sparse, especially moving reference.

Oh, and the cast and crew behind the movies and TV shows. Because, without them making such cool stuff, I wouldn’t have anything to try to recreate in my effort to eventually make my own cool stuff. You guys rule.

—

Well, I’ve been doing a little more work on the model, and have made (though not yet textured) the iris. Only trouble is, the jagging-out star bit in the middle doesn’t fit together quite right (I tried to get it so it would, but it would make the slats (which are like this: ////) fit together differently (like this: \\\\), and I had to decide which I wanted to be accurate more, the slats or the star. I went with the slats.)

Also, if anyone ever wondered how the Iris could fit inside the Stargate while it wasn’t deployed, rest assured, it can’t. That’s another little problem I’ll have to work around.

Iris 1

Iris 2

Now, for these animations, I didn’t have any movies of the iris opening and closing available, so I had to guesstimate the keyframes based on the sound files I had, so it doesn’t move exactly right.

Iris Closing

Iris Opening

—

Well, I got the iris textured. It doesn’t look quite like the real thing, with a noticeable seam where the blades meet up, and a slightly fuzzier pattern of blotches. I also had to make a judgment call, in that the iris appears by turns blue or tan, for reasons I am unsure of. I picked blue, on the grounds that I can’t think of any tan metals. Can’t think of any that are quite that shade of blue, either, but that doesn’t matter much. Anyway, see it for yourself, inside the high-poly Stargate.

Iris 1
Iris 2

The Price

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From the B5 episode “Lines Of Communication”:

After a fleet of White Stars led by Delenn is ambushed by the Drakh, they narrowly escape with their lives. Not five seconds after reaching the safety of Hyperspace, Delenn, thirsting for vengeance, turns right around and attacks, vowing to make the Drakh pay the price.

I made this picture primarily because I wanted to blow stuff up, and use the White Star pulse cannon setup I had worked out. I think I was fairly successful on both counts.

So, you surrendered to the Intersteller Alliance in the hopes of finding mercy…

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And mercy is exactly what you’re getting.

The Mercy-class hospital ship, to be precise. First (and, as far I as I know, only) seen on this webpage, the design struck a cord with me, and I modified Matthew Tarling’s Omega-class destroyer into something rather similar to it (I took a few liberties with the design, mostly getting rid of the double-sized rotating section, because I think it looks silly. I mean, what the hell, it’s non-canon anyway). Also, to go with it, I retextured Mark Kane’s atmospheric shuttle into a medevac version. I might do the same thing to the standard shuttle, as well.

Anyway, on to the pic itself.

After a surprise attack on the Zagros VII ranger base by the Drakh, the Mercy-class hospital ship E.A.S. Nightingale is called in to help the wounded. On the off chance that any Drakh might be hanging around that might think an unarmed hospital ship is easy pickings, a trio of White Stars hooked up with the Nightingale as an escort.


EDIT: I updated the model of the Nightingale, and replaced the rendering with one containing the new version. Also, I made a sequel picture of the the E.A.S. Nightingale leaving Zagros.

Enjoy!

Look! Pictures! Here, right here! Click this to get them! Now!

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That’s right, folks. I’m now tapping the stream of pictures going directly from layout to my fancy-shmancy cycling desktop (randomly changing to a different rendering by yours truly every thirty minutes) and diverting them to the internet, for all to see. And this time, I’m putting credits on the image rather than making a big list at the end of the post, just because. So there.

First off is a picture of the Alexander being ambushed by the Clarkstown at the beginning of “Severed Dreams”. Notice the Orion nebula in the background. Since the Alexander was supposed to have just left Orion 7, well, why the hell not?

This picure, consisting of a bunch of Centauri ships flying over the royal palace in that Season 5 episode, is named for a blooper shot. Londo looks up at the ships and says that he “Doesn’t like the look of this at all.” G’Kar dismisses it as being because of “That damned ‘El Ni–o'”.

Two Omegas Firing. Mainly done to see if the lensflare pulse blast I set up would look good in a still.

Here we have a scene from “No Surrender, No Retreat.” With all necessary apologies to Kier Darby, naturally.

White Stars in Hyperspace. I think it was a lighting test, at first.

A picture of Susan and Marcus’s search for First Ones in Season 4. Mostly because I really, really like that First Ones ship with the spinning unattached bits.

A shot of an Omega launching a shuttle. Textbook example of serendipity. I loaded the Omega in to my B5 space setup scene, and when I punched out my first test render, I had forgotten to alter the lighting, and found that having most of the light come from the planet and having the sun off somewhere else actually looked pretty good. It may be dark on some monitors, though.

Why did I do this? Because it was there. What was there, you ask? 561 Vorlon cruisers, about three dozen Vorlon fighters, and one Vorlon Planet-killer. While the swarm effect is very good, the rendering time of 31 hours, 9 minutes, and 1 second is enough to sate my huge-ass fleet appetite. For now, at least.

Check your connections, fellas: The Big One’s comin’…

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Whew. Been a while since I posted anything here, hasn’t it? Well, I’m going to make up for that in spades….

What follows is almost every rendering I’ve finished yet haven’t put up for one reason or another. I’ll include a description of the circumstances of it’s creation, and why it hasn’t been shown before. I considered putting them in chronological order, but decided that would be a bit more work than I wanted to put into this post. If you’re really curious, the dates for most of them are in the file name. Also, since many of these were never intended to be released for public consumption, none of the images have credits. They’ll be at the end of the post.

This is a still from an attempt of mine to recreate the Shadow Threat trailer for Babylon 5: Into the Fire (I wanted a high-res version, and the version available wasn’t high-res enough). Whenever I finished a shot, I would render out a couple of frames in a larger size to use as a desktop background. This particular shot is an Omega coming out of a Jump point. I stopped work on the animation when I realized that, as I had no explosion movies or the wherewithal to create my own, finishing the scenes with things exploding would be problematic. I was also likely distracted by something shiny, a common problem when I try to take on a long-term project.

Another Shadow Threat shot, of the same scene.

This was a shipyard preview picture of a Brakiri ship from another abortive attempt, namely to create a Babylon 5 Plug-In (basically a mod) for the space-trading game Escape Velocity: Nova. This project stopped when I realized I enjoyed conceptualizing and making graphics more than I did writing mission and planet descriptions and programing, even the insanely easy programing of EV plug-ins. I am a weak man, after all.

Incidentally, if anyone ever wants to make a B5 plug-in for EV, I have a shitload of sprites and preview pics, some pretty cool ideas, and a desire to help.

Yet another Shadow Threat shot, this time a test render from the last shot I made. This is where the explosion problem caught up with me. But it was my favorite shot in the movie, so I really wanted to make it.

Any tips on the explosion thing would be nice, too. I’d kinda like to finish the animation up, one of these months.

An EV Shipyard pic, this time of a Drakh cruiser.

Still shot of Keffer biting the big one in the season two finale.

A screen shot of the Escape Velocity plug-in I mentioned earlier. Well, that’s not quite accurate. I used the sprites and masks, plus a few screenshots of EV for a background, and Photoshopped up a fake screenshot. But it gives you some idea of what it would look like if I got around to actually making the damned thing. In case your wondering, that’s supposed to be the Minbari-Human first contact.

EV ship preview of the Hyperion-class. I should mention that I intended for each ship to be displayed in its preview in it’s home system, hence Jupiter in the background.

A shot of the Starfury launch from the Shadow Threat.

The shipyard preview for the Omega. And before you complain that Omega’s don’t fire blue pulses, that’s supposed to be an early-model Omega. Since the one in episode with the Free-Mars zombie had an Omega fire blue pulses in the flashback, I figured the first Omegas took weapons from the Hyperion so they could be put into service despite the new weapons not being finished.

If you go to Z’ha’dum…. EV shipyard preview for the Shadow Battlecrab.

Another shot of the Shadow threat starfury launch.

Ah, that’s more like it! A shadow ship gets hit by an Omega’s laser in this shot from the Shadow Threat.

Star Trek pics coming up, beware!

And now, for something completely different a Star Trek-styled map of Sector 221-G, the setting of the Star Trek: New Frontier novel series (can you tell I like those books?). I tried to get the look of the Nemesis-version of the LCARS interface, with the beveling and the brushed metal, and I think it turned out pretty good. I also worked in pretty much every planet mentioned in the series, spelling most of them correctly.

A Star Trek shot of a Galaxy-class ship (the Excalibur-A from the Star Trek: New Frontier books) in drydock.

Spacedock, above Earth, with the Enterprise visible behind it. Just for giggles, I made the Earth in this scene “life-sized”, all 12,000 kilometers of its diameter. I kinda liked how it turned out. I don’t have to worry about perspective changes looking wrong this way.

Just a simple beauty shot.

A Klingon Bird of Prey fires torpedo at a shuttle carrying a dignitary after sneaking to Earth under cloak. I like the way the moon turned out in this pic, don’t you?

And a couple pictures of Earth itself finish off the posting binge.

Oh, right, credits. If I forget something, I’m relying on you to tell me so I can edit it in. And don’t think I’m ordering it in any way other than when I thought of them.

Earth: Reto Stöckli and Robert Simmon
Moon and Mars: James Hastings-Trew
Spacedock: Nick Pigg
U.S.S. Enterprise: Dennis Baily
U.S.S. Constitution and shuttlecraft:
Klingon Bird of Prey: Fabio Passaro
Galaxy Class: Chris Setterington
U.S.S. Voyager: Sarod
U.S.S. Prometheus and Babylon 5: Ed Giddings
Drydock 1: Nico Wiegand and M.
Drydock 2: Nick Martens
Nebula: Kier Darby
Omega Destroyer and Nova Dreadnaught: Matt Tarling
Starfury: Mark Kane
Thunderbolt: Nick Lee
Hyperion Cruiser and Minbari Fighter: Craig A. Clark
Olympus Corvette: Leo Dunin
Jupiter and the Galialan Moons: Björn Jönsson
Brakiri ship, Shadow ships, Drakh ships, Z’ha’dum and Nebula: Nadab Göksu
Jumppoint: Yuri A. Parovin
Epsilon and Brakiri Nebulas: Jeff Richards
Epsilon 3: Jeff Richards and Matt Tarling
Minbari Warcruiser: Thomas Banner
Hyperspace: James Reding

SPECIAL BONUS OFFER!
Since making this post, I took a look at some of my old Shadow Threat animations, and I don’t know if its the new version of Quicktime, a recalibrated monitor, or what, but they look much more kick-ass than I remember. And I want to share the ass-kicking with you (no, not like that). So, when I completed two consecutive scenes from the Shadow Threat, I took out the audio, and made a small feasibility test, which I’m now sharing with you. It requires Quicktime 6, and is compressed as an MPEG 4.

Shadow Threat Clip

Astronomical Gallery

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A Lot of Beauty Shots of Babylon 5

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Well, I was working on a default scene setup for Babylon 5 and the surrounding area, and using a previous scene a setup, I got it all up, when I noticed the camera was animating from an old keyframe. I thought it looked pretty cool, and next thing I know, I’m wondering how I’ll render this 800 frame flyaround of the station.

Well, the same way I render any long animation: In lotsa tiny chunks. In between, I let the camera run around and rendered any interesting looking frames at full size for desktop use. And so, here we are!

 

This is the first frame of the animation, with Babylon 5, Epsilon 3, and the nebula, all in good lighting. When I set it up, I was thinking of a picture in the B5 Security Manual, just above all the statistics for the station.

 

This is the last frame of the animation, with Babylon 5 silhouetted against the local nebula.

 

This frame is pretty close to the first one, and the main difference is that it’s more tightly focused on the rotating section of the station.

 

This is a picture that isn’t from the animation, but I made it while I was using a camera to position the Epsilon Jumpgate in relation to B5. I thought the view of the distant station through the struts of the Jumpgate was pretty neat, so I punched out a render.

 

Last is my personal favorite. It’s a shot of B5 from the rear. With no planet in the background, and the light picking up the shine from B5’s hull, this one just seems to scream at me “…all alone in the night.”

Illinois Nazis

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The year— 2267
Pilots Jake and Elwood Blues, flying a patrol with Captain Ivanova near New Chicago in the Illinois system have detected an anomaly on they route. They go in to investigate and discover a group of Black Omega Star Furies. All three pilots have an unhappy previous relationship with Psi-Cops, with Jake and Elwood referring to them as Nazis.

After their scanners confirm the sight before them, a quick muttered conversation takes place in Jake and Elwood’s Thunderbolt, and both their ship and Ivanova’s fire their engines and accelerate toward the Black Omegas….