Is it really that much more expensive to use actual ship models instead of CG? It looks way more realistic IMO.
^^^ The TNG intro? Um, no it doesn't. The lighting of the 1701-D is utterly unrealistic in that opening sequence.
For starters everyone on the set filming the practical model + the modelmakers is in a union. The dudes in the CGI sweatshop in Eastern Europe? Not so much.
All space scenes in all the shows are unrealistic. It's just a matter of how. In addition to fill lighting in deep space, all the stellar phenomena are much more visible and spectacular than real life. New trek has pushed that to 11, even more than TNG era trek did.
Pixomondo does not have branches in Eastern Europe. According to Wikipedia "Los Angeles, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and London"
I wasn't being entirely literal (although a CGI house from Macedonia did work on Disco and Picard). Point being low pay and long hours don't make a great finished product and it's an industry wide issue. Just in the last few years we had Black Panther, Cats, Death on the Nile.. all big budget movies with terrible CGI. I'm sure if I watched more stuff I could point to other examples!
Not being a CGI expert, it all looks fine to me. Especially since I've never been to space and the only real 'space-ship' I've ever seen is the ISS and the Space Shuttle. They both look terrible when filmed. I let my imagination do the thinking when I'm watching Sci-Fi/Fantasy, I'm not interested in evaluating the Producers monetary decisions while watching. (or afterward either) Honestly, all CGI is inherently fake anyway, trying to evaluate it against reality is a waste of time as far as I'm concerned.
Theres realistic, then theres what looks good on tv. If we can't see the ship.. How can we see any action.? And it's only dark if it's in the shadow of a planet or deep space. Rest of the time its quite bright! Look at the Iss in the daylight. If the ship is a solar system it's quite lite. Cgi looks like a cheap in game cut scene..
To those who are saying the CGI doesn't look real, it's clear that the intro CGI isn't supposed to look realistic in the way the same scenes would appear if they featured in the show. From the lighting to the camerawork to the positioning of the ship, it's very, very clearly stylized.
As a side note, I absolutely love it whenever I see HD screenshots of the TNG remaster that make it painfully obvious that the ship is a piece of spraypainted plastic. An overhead shot from The Nth Degree in particular, shortly after Barclay gets hit by the energy surge from probe, is close enough to make the imperfections in the 4-feet model (like the bumps on the seam where the saucer is attached to the neck and some rippling on the saucer's surface directly above) easily visible.
It didn't, really. It looked like nice model work. So did the ships in most of the TOS-based movies. But really, who cares?
Yes. And you can't do nearly as much with them. Any other questions with simple, obvious answers? Yeah, okay. The CG work here is fine.
Modern CGI can look exactly like the models they made in the 80's/90's if that's a thing they wanted to do. That's a particular look and not "realistic". The thing about CGI is that it can look indistinguishable from our idea of reality, it can look completely fantastical, or it can look like an old PlayStation game. It's flexibility is nearly limitless and the possibilities expand every year. What is delivered depends on the time, skill, and money the artists have. And how we perceive the results depends at least partly on our individual interpretations of what looks real. The effects scenes we've seen so far in SNW show they're going for a more fantastical look than a realistic one.
Rogue One in particular absolutely nailed the 1977 model look of the Star Destroyers. One of the reasons we all have different views on this is no one actually knows what a ship the size of the Enterprise would actually look like in orbit or deep space. For all we know the real ship filmed with real cameras would look "fake" to our eyes.