Doug is a peach. When—after years of online chatting—I offered to take him out for coffee or lunch he said, "Just come to the house".
Another one down, the ODN Network Analysis graphic, which was seen on the bridge in both FC and INS. However, I'm left a little unsatisfied with this one, as I don't know what the correct colors are, since my Captain's Chair video file for this one is in the red-alert mode (and is therefore all red graphics against a white Sovereign schematic). All I have are a couple of out of focus shots of it in screencaps, where I can detect hints of blue and magenta on top of a yellow/orange schematic, so I've tried my best to guess the colors. After a couple of hours of tweaking colors, I've decided to call it done for now and move on. I spent the entire day generating the 20 different overlayed "network" graphics that this one featured, so I'm a little frustrated right now that I'm not satisfied with it. Sigh. EDIT: I created this alternate, monochromatic coloring of the scan graphic, as it appears more "correct" to me due to the fact that the Red Alert version I have for reference is also monochrome. I'm worrying too much about it. Or maybe I'm too tired
Sounds like it. But you have an instinct for this sort of thing (obviously). So what is your spidey-sense telling you is wrong? If you don't have a good reference then you must be getting input from something else, right? Does it not compare well with the environment? Other displays? An aesthetic baseline that you've just internalized at this point and don't realize?
I think where I get tangled up is when I don't have a clear reference, in this case, colors. The design is 100% accurate (using the red-alert version that came with Captain's Chair CD-ROM), but because I don't know the exact colors of the non-red-alert display (other than blobs of color based on out-of-focus screencaps), my brain can't say "Yep! This is accurate!". And, because I treat each individual piece of an environment with equal weight to the environment itself as a whole, if one of those pieces doesn't click the "accurate" button in my brain, I don't know how to judge it, and the scale tips to "wrong". Silly. In a week, I'll look back over this individual piece, and realize I did my best and that it's rather insignificant compared to the totality of the bridge, and if clearer references reveal themselves I can always easily adjust.
I admit I got slightly sick of creating the animated monitor displays after working on them for two straight weeks, so I figured I'd turn my attention to the final piece of the puzzle: the Master Systems Display. Now, many people know that the MSD that was on the set doesn't quite match the exterior geometry of the Enterprise-E filming miniature and CG models due to it possibly being created before the ship design was finalized, and other artists have created "corrected" MSDs to reflect the ship as it finally appeared, complete with a Captain's Yacht and other post-FC details. Colleague @SuricataFX graciously lent me his MSD for the project, but after some internal debate, I felt it necessary to maintain the graphic we see on the bridge set for on-set accuracy reasons, which I why I reached out to Doug Drexler for the authentic graphic in the first place. I've spent the last three nights modifying Doug's Illustrator file of the MSD to match what we see on-screen in all three films (as far as I can tell, the MSD graphic was unchanged between films). This meant doing the following: Modifying the hull outline and deck lines to be less orange and more yellow, and bringing all deck lines forward so that they are on top of the graphic. Also adding some yellow wall lines where there previously were purple ones. Removing the orange and purple turbolift channels so that the shafts appear clear, and cleaning up the graphics "underneath" the orange and purple channels once they were removed. Removing a Type 6 shuttle in the hangar bay and moving the extended Type 6 to the right of it in its place. Removing all the 6 foot humanoid figures that were placed throughout the ship for scale, as they appear to be absent in the on-screen version. Removing all gradients from the graphic, from things like the computer core, bussard collectors, and warp coils, among others. Removing the upper and lower warp core elements (in it's place will be an animated graphic, eventually) Recoloring the oranges to be slightly more red, and the purples to be slightly more blue. Adding the call-outs Removing miscellaneous elements that didn't appear in the on-screen graphic The graphic was then ready to UV onto the console geometry, which presented a problem since the two halves of the console meet at an angle and not a straight line. A lot of cleanup was necessary to get everything to align at an angle. It still doesn't align perfectly, but it wasn't perfect on set either. The on-set graphic had further modifications to it (bits near the seam were omitted or shortened to get it properly aligned) but I did not find it necessary to do so, so I maintained the integrity of the original graphic in a few of those places. The MSD graphic itself is 8192x2048 pixels, overlayed on a separate UV channel than the surrounding graphics. Anyway, here are the results. I'll spend the rest of the weekend in After Effects animating it as we see on-screen, including a turbolift car moving through the shafts
Oh wow. I never gave it much thought, but how did they do that on set? Was it a static graphic and then they added moving bits with-- I don't even know how?
Not sure. I think it was a combination of elements...practical backlit animations using rotating or panning elements like we saw on various Enterprise-D displays, and perhaps projected elements for things like the turbo lifts moving through the ship, with maybe an LCD screen for the bussard collector animation?
Gorgeous, as always, but I have to ask, did somebody ruin it for everybody? I noticed your Flickr account disables downloading to disk, now.
Is it possible in your real-time graphics to physically simulate the polamotion graphics they used on the show?
My god, Donny, the level of your craftsmanship never ceases to astound me. I don’t think I could be convinced some of these shots you’ve rendered weren’t captured by the unit photographer during pre-production on First Contact.
Yes, stuff like this is very easy to do now that I've learned After Effects. But even before that, I made several similar graphics with Unreal's material editor for my unfinished Enterprise-A bridge, it was just a more convoluted and limited process than what I'm doing now. Not yet, but it's on my list of things to do in the near future! Thanks for that! That's such a high compliment. :-D