MayaMan at the Foundation 3D website clued me in to the following link: an interview with the various visual effects professionals who worked on Star Trek. Some interesting highlights: Yet another answer for "how long is the Enterprise?" (This article puts her at 2,357 feet in length.) Just about the entire sequence with Scotty in the "inert reactant" tubes was CGI. Keenser had some extensive CGI plastic surgery.
DD and ILM provide some really good work for this film. I knew the pipes were CG but I really couldn't see it. Did I read that right? The cop's mask is entirely CG (or just enhanced with CG)?
I just thought it was interesting that this article implies that the cop is a robot. In other interviews with J.J. I've seen him state that the airbike cop was a human being. I agree that the pipe sequence was marvelously executed, and I suppose I figured that the pipe sequence had to be CGI--there's just no way Anheuser-Busch would allow Simon Pegg to swim around in their brewery tubes. Of course that would explain a great deal about the taste of Budweiser.
I think the artists just thought the cop was a robot because they had to add their magic to that mask.
The part I found interesting is that the hull plating is not a uv map if I read that right. They developed some kind of procedural that actually hard modelled the plates. Cool! Oh, and "we looked at cruiseships for detail" = we needed an excuse to expense that cruise to mexico we took.
The way I read it, the only procedural hull plates were the ones that were created as debris from the explosions.
You have no idea how hard I'm biting my tongue right now. Very interesting article. Though, now I'm biting my tongue for an entirely different reason (will leave criticism of the movie to another forum.)
I only knew because on one of the on-set photos you could see some of the orange coloured connection-pieces as practical elements, but there was no glass, and not even quite so many as in the film. But I really couldn't tell, in the film, what was CG and what was practical, on-set.
I noticed the CGI less in this movie than any other FX-heavy film I've seen. The only obvious use of CGI that I noticed, was when they went into a close-up of the red matter as it imploded after the Jellyfish had crashed into Nero's ship. The Enterprise itself was particularly stunning. Especially in the scene where the shuttle leaves Iowa with Kirk & Bones on board and they fly past the half-finished Enterprise. But everything was so well done. This is the way CGI should be used, as opposed to something like 'The Clone Wars' where it takes over the film.