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Points of Departure CG Recreation

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  • DarthCaligulaDarthCaligula Elite Ranger
    Oh, so it is accurate? It just looks weird. But I'll take your word for it. I guess it's just not what I expected. For example those scenes from the show in the Sancturary look different. More what I was expecting I guess, but that part of the station is much farther out, so that's why it looks so different, right?
  • David of MacDavid of Mac Elite Ranger Ca
    Possibly. I think it's more that the bulk of the command sphere and cobra bay is in the way of the vanishing point, so it's easier to imagine it being higher, and the window is wider, so you get a better sense of the up-and-down motion, as oppose to the spinning.
  • David of MacDavid of Mac Elite Ranger Ca
    I've [url=http://www.gian-cursio.net/2012/06/b5-2x01-004/]posted the blog entry for this and the previous clip[/url]. The money, though is linked right here.

    [url=http://www.gian-cursio.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/2x01c_Seq_02c.m4v][img]http://www.gian-cursio.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/2x01c-Seq-02c-Poster-300x168.jpg[/img][/url]

    There are two Observation Dome window shots in this sequence. The first ended up being more difficult to track than I anticipated, and I'm going to have to double back and redo it when I'm better at tracking and compositing stuff that was never meant to be tracked or composited. The second shot, though, is locked off and has a pretty good view out the window, and that turned out beautifully. And, yeah, it looks like the stars rotate around the horizon line. I think we're just going to have to accept it. Though now I want to find one of those big spinning things on playgrounds and lie down on one with my head at the edge looking up to see how the sky looks for myself rotating at that angle. You're right, it really is counter-intuitive.

    Next up is another B5 establisher, and then the flashback to the Battle of the Line, which I'm honestly not sure how I'm going to do, so I'll stall by writing an article about reconciling all the different times we saw the Battle of the Line.
  • FreejackFreejack Jake the Not-so-Wise
    I don't think it looks all that counterintuitive. Watch it for just a bit and it seems pretty natural.

    Jake
  • BigglesBiggles <font color=#AAFFAA>The Man Without a Face</font>
    That looks really impressive.

    How do you do the tracking?
  • A2597A2597 Fanboy
    OK, so where do I buy the BluRay's for this? ;)
  • David of MacDavid of Mac Elite Ranger Ca
    [QUOTE=Biggles;195386]How do you do the tracking?[/QUOTE]

    For the moment, I've been using the tracking features in After Effects CS3. Given how slidey it got with the first shot of this pair, I'm beginning to think I shouldn't rely on it for more than film jitter and smooth pans. I haven't really played with exporting camera data from Autodesk Match Move into After Effects, but I'm guessing that'll what it'll come down to if I want a decent solve for some of these shots.
  • David of MacDavid of Mac Elite Ranger Ca
    It's back!

    So, a month or so back, I decided that I was unhappy with my progress on my personal projects. Pretty much, they were all big ambitious things, and I was mostly ending up just doing the creative version of pushing your vegetables around on your plate rather than eating them. So I decided to take my three top priorities, and work on them a week at a type, with a fourth week in the cycle being left free. So far, it's actually been working.

    Even though I haven't touched it in six years, the internet loves this project, and with the recent chatter about B5 when it began streaming on Amazon Prime, I started hearing about it again. And I really want to get back to it. Trouble is, I still need either fancier models, or models at all, and even the fancy models I have will need to be at least a little rejiggered to look good in Lightwave 2018's new texturing system.

    I initially started working on a Starfury. Like, the Cadillac of Starfuries. The cockpit matched to the live action set, the engines and fins all animating, and, if I can figure it out, rigged so it responds automatically to animation. I got as far as setting up all my modeler backdrops, getting a decent photogrammetry solve on the cockpit set from the TLT special features, and a bit of work on the engine pod, which I'm probably going to restart on after finding some better reference for fighter jet engines. I'm a sucker for moving parts.

    image

    This week, I did something else. I had an epiphany about a way to approach one of the age-old Babylon 5 questions; what does the back of a jump point look like? Sometime in the last year or two, I saw some issues of the old Lightwave official magazine on-line, and read some Babylon 5 material circa, like, season one, which mentioned that the jump point wasn't "supposed" to be a cone, but that it was concepted as being a flat-ish portal that extended into infinity when looked into, and the cone shape was just forced perspective. That doesn't really fit in with how it was shown over the course of the show, which made it clear that it had to be funnel-shaped, but it made me wonder if that factoid could apply to this project.

    Anyway, based on that, I realized a sensible answer to the back-of-the-jump-point question (another jump point, in the opposite direction), and a way to show it, but I'd need to model my own point to do it.

    There were a lot of false starts, but I ended up with something pretty neat. Since I was making one from scratch anyway, and I didn't want to just rip off one of the old ones in my library for the texture, I decided to try my hand at making the version we saw in The Lost Tales. I'll probably fiddle with it more later (I might add the wings from the Crusade jump point, and I'm definitely doing a Crusade-inspired opening effect).

    image

    image

    image

    image
  • David of MacDavid of Mac Elite Ranger Ca
    Huh. I can post in the "archived forums," but it doesn't show up in the "recent discussions," which I assume is the only thing anyone ever checks on the forum. Well, I'll start a new topic once there's something a little more exciting to show.
  • DarthCaligulaDarthCaligula Elite Ranger
    I got a notification in my e-mail. Looks pretty cool.
  • Awesome! This is such a great project.
  • croxiscroxis I am the walrus
    Any chance you would be willing to open some of your work for public use?
  • David of MacDavid of Mac Elite Ranger Ca
    As a general rule, sure. I wanted to lock down that jump point a little more before I put it up for download, but I've been distracted by another project. Is there anything specific you have your eye on?
  • croxiscroxis I am the walrus
    I was hunting for some b5 meshes the other day and a lot of the old resources have vanished into 404 and domain not available sadness. I also want to play with unreal 4 and just see B5 ships floating around in VR.
  • if you set that up Croxis do share! I'll look through my old storage drives and see if I have any B5 stuff too...
  • David of MacDavid of Mac Elite Ranger Ca
    Funny you should mention Unreal, I saw someone mention doing just that on the Babylon Project forums last year. Wow, things move slowly in an aged fandom.

    https://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=93783.0

    I'm not super-comfortable redistributing others' models since I've modified most of them in some way or another, but anything new I make is definitely going up for download, and I wouldn't be opposed to passing on any lost meshes I can find in their original forms (assuming the modeler didn't deliberately pull them off-line).
  • croxiscroxis I am the walrus
    edited October 2018


    From A2597 stuff he sent me, but I got an untextured B5 into VR!
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