David’s Babylon 5 Stuff

[David cgc]

Babylon 5 was the thing that originally got me into CG (mostly), and I've been imagining what I'd do if I got the chance to run a TOS-R style remaster of the show with all-new visual effects for a very long time. Expansions of scope, extra details, but still faithful to the original style. Every now and then I circle back around to that idea, and last year, I decided to start working on something I'd wanted to make for a while, a high-definition version of the White Star.

I decided to start with the gold-standard for turn-of-the-century fan-models, Kier Darby's White Star. He had a nearly-complete tutorial walking through his construction process, and had been been gifted the actual texture maps from the original model as reference by Ron Thornton, who'd designed and built the White Star for the show. Following Kier's tutorial and constantly checking against his final model got me most of the way there, and helped me learn about spline modeling, an unfashionable but still potentially useful technique. There's also been some additional reference material of the White Star released since Kier made his final version, especially high-definition renders from B5Scrolls and the official Babylon 5 on-line encyclopedia, so I was able to spot some inaccuracies to the original mode that I could correct on mine. There were also some inaccuracies I wanted in the model. Kier's model had a very complex blended shape for the undercarriage of the ship that I think looks better than the simpler version on the show model, and I also blended together several gaps and rough seams in the original design where different structures met, like the pillars holding up the bridge section, and the transition between the lower nose and lower hull, as well as filling in the inner sections of the upper and lower nose, where in the original version of the ship, those sections were visibly hollow shells.

The other day, I finished the last bits of exterior modeling on the main ship, so I decided having a "minimum viable White Star" would be a good time to open the WIP thread here.





(I did try to imitate the lighting and camera angles of Kier's renders of his model in a few of these, partially for comparison, but mostly for nostalgia.)

And now to tour some of the details.



I followed the overall structure of the weapons from the original, with some light additional paneling and grooves. For the barrels, I changed the cylindrical originals to something more bell-shaped, evoking the Excalibur from the sequel series, Crusade. Since it was described as being a "destroyer-class White Star," I wanted to foreshadow more of the detailing, create a little more of a family resemblance between two very different ships. The smaller barrels were tipped with spheres on the original model, but there was a larger faceted-sphere detail in the nose that I thought was probably intended to be some sort of sensor housing, like a radome, so I shrunk it down and placed it there, as if it was a targeting sensor.

The biggest change for the wingtip guns was that I designed a pivoting and rotating base, to give them a range of motion. There were one or two times in the show the White Star fired off-axis, but it usually seemed a little awkward that the wing guns, which seemed to be the "light" weapons meant for suppressing fire and targeting small ships, were so widely spaced that they'd mostly shoot around fighters. There wasn't enough room to give them a huge range of motion, but it's still a big improvement.



Here's the "tech" detailing in the "mouth" at the front of the ship. I generally stuck fairly close to the original (by way of Kier's version) with only a little pit of extra beveling. I thought I might be under-doing it, but in the first few images in the thread, you can see how this area is typically in shadow (I may need to actually add some utility lights in the nooks and crannies to give it a sense of depth). The ribs/teeth were also redesigned to more closely resemble similar details on the Excalibur, and I added an actual barrel for the main beam cannon, which usually came out of the glowing yellow section on the lower nose. You can also see the larger version of the "radome" I mentioned before, and I made a very low-detail version of the freezer-rack "grate" that was ubiquitous on B5 and other '90s Sci-Fi (and modern-day throwbacks) that I slotted into a couple spots. It's almost at real-life scale to the actual grates.



I'll admit, I don't have a big feel for mechanical detailing, the nurnies and greebles and all that. I looked to Chris Kuhn and Amras Arfeiniel's respective White Star models for inspiration on how to put a little more complexity into this section. Also, fun fact, the "eye" cannons and the wingtip cannons are exactly the same size. I always assumed the ones on the wings were smaller.



You might've noticed in some of the earlier renders that I modeled the landing gear seen in the "War Without End" two-parter. It's a little off, in the show the front legs were positioned more widely, into the lower wing, while the rear legs were nearly touching. It took a few tries to figure out a way to move or retract the organic hull to reveal the landing gear wells that didn't look absolutely hideous, and this was the best I could do. Rather than rig the landing gear properly, I used morphs to retract them, on the assumption that they'd probably never be seen extending up-close. They certainly weren't in the show.

You can also see a hint of a black stripe above the glowing yellow section at the front of the lower hull. This is going to be the meditation room seen in the recent animated movie, "The Road Home," since it seems to be pretty much the only place a wide forward-facing window that's blocked in the center can go on the ship.

So, what's left to do? More-or-less in order:

• Low-detail bridge and crew.
• Low-detail meditation room.
• Extendable boarding tunnel from "War Without End"
• Boarding ramps
• Landing bay interior
• Elaborate landing bay door
• UVing and texture maps
• Light rig and variant set-ups
• Another set of UVs to bake all the textures for compatibility with other programs
• And some extra-special projects once the model is actually done

The tricky part of the bridge is cramming it into the hull. The oval floorplan fits well enough into the egg-shaped bridge module at first glance, but the set had very tall walls, while the exterior is a fairly sleek dome. The set was also extensively redesigned between season 3 and 4 (which fits well-enough in-universe, since we only saw the prototype's bridge in season 3, and never saw it after, so it can be a case of different things looking different). The forward half had more-or-less the same aesthetics in both versions, though the actual shape was different. I'm going to start by making the season 3 version, since it's narrower and will fit better into the exterior, and then I can replace just the back half of the bridge to make the season 4 version.

 

[David cgc]

I've been working on the season 3 bridge. I've gotten all the walls in place, and curled them inwards where necessary to fit within the dome. For the "stained glass" walls, I used screencaps from the show combined in Photoshop. I mean to do the same things with the computer screens, at least for this version. In the future, I'd like to do a version accurate to the sets that's intended to be rendered from inside, and in that case, I'll definitely go to the trouble of repainting those graphics from scratch. At the very least, that'll wait until I get some more hard drive, and I can rip the blu-rays so I can get some more detail in my screencaps of the sets.

Mostly, I've just been distracted by, with every sub-assembly, orbiting around the bridge object and seeing the little room take shape through the windows, and I figured I'd share some of the fun.




You can see some of the distortion where I brought the walls in the aft half of the room down to fit them within the dome. Though they aren't visible from out the window, there are a few reasons I want them to be pretty clean. 1, if and when I do a more detailed version, it'll be helpful to have a rough version that's more accurate rather than less. 2, each wall panel is different, and they were all rearranged for the season 4 bridge, so I'll need to have them all anyway. 3, better light-safe than light-sorry, I don't want any gaps in the room where weird shadows or reflections might come out, and 4, I learned from my old Enterprise-refit interiors that I cannot make something so low-detail that someone won't try to do a closeup of it.

For comparison, here are the floorplans for both versions of the set. This image is annotated, the numbers represent the shapes of the screens on each wall segment, the letters the specific set of graphics on them, my idea is to make one texture with all the graphics from the show, and then move the UVs around for each screen so I can make different combinations. Playing around with the space in 3D, I can see why they made the front half shorter but wider, it's very cramped, and there's often just a big expanse of empty space between the sidecar-Minbari up front and the captain's chair.




A view of how the bridge fits inside the exterior. I've been complaining a lot about the low ceiling, but that does undersell that there's a lot of room in the back, and space for another level below. I've been thinking about what might go there, but right now, all that's important is what you can see from outside.

Speaking of...



And, finally, the captain's-eye view:

 

[Mage]

It's so good seeing people tackle Babylon 5. The Whitestar is definitely a scifi icon if you ask me.

Good work!!

 

[David cgc]

I was going to get a bit more progress done before my next update, but something weird happened and I have to tell someone.

At the front of the bridge, there are these two pods. Pilot and gunner, maybe? No idea. They're always staffed by ND, non-speaking Religious-caste Minbari, even in the later seasons when the White Star crews started to be more Minbari and Human Rangers.



They look a lot like motorcycle sidecars. Like, a lot. Enough to make me suspicious that they were found objects. I never really looked into it until today aside from Googling to see if anyone else had mentioned a provenance. Since I was going to start modeling the low-poly version, I thought I'd take a look. Most of my search results were for very, very old-fashioned sidecars, midcentury or earlier. While I was trying to figure out a way to narrow it down, I had a hunch; Babylon 5 had a product-placement deal with Kawasaki in season 1, with a subplot about Garibaldi building a vintage motorcycle from parts. Maybe, if they had an existing relationship, the art department could use that to get their hands on a sidecar for cheap.

In the first row of results for Kawasaki motorcycle sidecar, I found this (with a comparison shot from nearly the same angle from "Walkabout"):



Almost all the visible details match exactly. There's a divot on the B5 prop where the windscreen was mounted, the back half of the seam of the door is still visible... the only major difference I can see is there's a second bevel near the top, which could be something added when it was redressed, or, more likely, is a minor revision in the actual sidecar design (the motorcycle it's attached to is from 1991, and the White Star sets were built in 1995).

Now, here's the weird part; that seems to be an aftermarket addition, not a Kawasaki part. It's a wild stroke of luck that right when I happened to look this up, the exact thing I was looking for was attached to the only motorcycle make associated with Babylon 5. I do hope this is going to be a lucky week, and I didn't just use up all my good fortune and I'll be stepping on rakes for the next few days.

Anyway, I wrote the shop selling the bike to ask if they could give me a manufacturer or model number for the sidecar. If that comes up dry, I'll start asking around online if and when I do a high-poly White Star set model.

But I haven't just been doing freaky-good Googling, here's a fresh modeler view of the Bridge (now with Captain's chair and rear consoles), and the texture map for the season 3 version of the rear wall displays.





These are all perspective-corrected and lightly touched-up from episode screenshots (probably over-detailed as it is, these will only be a few pixels across in a render, but as I said, I want a foundation for later work). Those "lily pad" configurations and others in that style are what make up most of the horizontal consoles, and those aren't replaced in season 4 when the wall graphics get something a little more elaborate. I do have a soft-spot for the stubby little figurative White Star illustration on this version. I certainly like it better than the stubby little version of the Defiant that it got when its set was made made before the exterior was finalized.

 

[Starship]

Good work David!

 

[David cgc]

I hit a wall making the little free-standing consoles. Just something about the lack of clear reference and their spindly, overlapping legs (and, just, other stuff that was going on) made me dread working on them. I eventually muscled through making a basic version, as well as the other necessities of the White Star 1 bridge. I adjusted the shape a little more to get it suitably crammed into the exterior of the bridge, and arranged the elements to represent the variations seen throughout the season. It took some experimentation, and I learned some interesting stuff about physically-based surfacing.

The thing was, while the exterior of the bridge windows were curved along the shape of the dome, for the interior surface of the glass, I just made simple simple four-point polygons at the inner edge of the window frames, which made each window a weirdly-shaped convex lens and severely distorted the view through them. I solved that by reducing the glass material's refractive index to 1, but eventually noticed that that also eliminated reflections from the glass. I tried a couple of work-arounds (using the "Clearcoat" double-reflection surface seemed to work, but I discovered in a couple of test renders Clearcoat seems to include some kind of iridescence or color-shifting effect that isn't mentioned in the manual), so eventually I just deleted my flat inner-windows and replaced them with ones that conformed to the curve of the exterior and used a normal glass shader.

Anywho, here's a selection of the way the White Star bridge changed over time. The ship was seen in 10 episodes of season 3 (counting the two-parter as one), There are six images here, though I really only need five, but there was a minor visual distinction, and it wasn't until revisions that I realized how minor it was (I was assuming the free-standing consoles moved around a lot more than they did). I did try to position the sidecars more-or-less as they were in each episode, but they'd sometimes be repositioned for a certain shot, so I didn't worry too much about it.

In the debut episode, "Matters of Honor," the bridge is very unfinished. It doesn't even have a captain's chair, one of the motorcycle sidecars is tucked into the back of the bridge (I assume there are really only two, and they just moved it around for different angles), the free-standing consoles have these weird, boney, spine-shaped frames around them (and there's a fourth one! I barely even realized there were three consoles instead of two, and then I go and see there's a fourth one that might only be in this episode for all I can tell), and many of the computer screens and control consoles are different, the lilly-pad graphics not having been made yet (I didn't bother making an alternate texture set for these displays, since they were only in the one episode).

We next see the ship in episode 5, "Voices of Authority," and it's started to look a lot more like itself. The boney growths are gone, the the captain's chair is in place, and there's a shiny black vinyl floor. While the floor was a regular feature after the permanent version of the set was built in season 4, this is the only episode where it appears in season 3, before and after, there's a dull gray floor which I strongly suspect is the bare concrete floor of the soundstage, though it might be some kind of carpet that wouldn't need as much effort to make sure it was perfectly flat before shooting. Also, for some reason, they left the door to the bridge open for the whole episode.

In episode 8, "Messages from Earth," the bridge is pretty much settled. The aftmost set of stained glass panels is replaced by a set of simple white lights. Looking closely, what actually happened was that the bridge set was elongated for this episode, and in the first two episodes, the first divider with the Vorlon-skin and the sconce was right up against the proscenium arch surrounding the nose area. Beginning in this one, it was moved back, and one of the sets of stained-glass panels was moved up to fill the gap, with the light panel replacing the last one. I'm kind of married to this floor-plan for logistical reasons, though, it was hard enough to cram everything in there using the post-"Messages" floorplan (moving everything forward eight feet is not going to happen), and the shortened version of the set is only apparent in one shot of "Matters of Honor" that I only just noticed while I was drafting this post (my prior theory had been that the front and back of the bridge had been shot separately in the first two episodes), so the first two episodes will just have six stained glass panels instead of four.

In episode 10, "Severed Dreams," we only see the bridge briefly, in a tight shot on Delenn in the captain's chair, and there are no visible differences.

In episode 14, "Ship of Tears," it's pretty much the same as in "Messages From Earth." The only difference I spotted was that the holotank/plotting table at the front of the bridge is rotated differently, but it seems to be rotated differently in every episode. Oh, and the left and right sidecars switch places.

For 16 and 17, the "War Without End" two-parter, the holotank/plotting table is raised up to waist level, probably because Sheridan actually uses it to plot and/or hologram.

In episode 18, "Walkabout," the holotank is lowered back down its previous coffee-table height. The abstract graphic (which I much prefer) is replaced with a plain white galaxy (rather than trying to recreate or extract it I just used an illustration from NASA), which will remain for the rest of the show, until "The Road Home," where a new abstract graphic inspired by the original design was used. This is also the last time the holotank is used to display a hologram, or anything else.

There are no visible changes in episodes 20-22 "And the Rock Cried Out, 'No Hiding Place,'" "Shadow Dancing," and "Z'ha'dum."



So what's next for the White Star?

I want to finish the bridge before I move on to another part, and I've got a lot of pieces I can reuse for the season 4/5 version (and I want to do that before I start forgetting where I put things and why I did things certain ways), I have a good head start. I've also got to make Babylon 5 versions of my old little low-detail Starfleet crew figures, who I am both proud and mildly horrified to continue to see popping up in renders to this day, often much closer than I intended them to be seen (I really should've given them noses).



I've got some ideas for that, since there are so many movable elements on the bridge, I want to make the figures posable, but full rigs would be overkill. I think I'll just do endomorphs (aka blend shapes or shape keys) for a few basic poses (standing, sitting, standing with arms out as if working a console), though I'll also have to model some more basic figures, since the White Stars were full of people wearing cloaks, robes, dresses, and other non-form-fitting outfits. And I'll probably also take another whack at the heads to make them less crappy, but still generic.

 

[David cgc]

I've been plugging away on the season 4/5 version of the bridge. As far as modeling goes, I've got to do the railing/console rings that go around the command chairs on the center dais, consoles for the aft walls, the ceiling, and then distorting the whole aft half of the bridge to fit within the exterior dome. Then there's some texturing, collecting console graphics and splitting off parts for the variants, and then I'll be done with the bridge.



I can hardly believe it, but I actually did intend to model an entire spaceship at one point and not just one set that'll hardly be visible from the outside.

That pic is mostly for context, though. I realized I'd modeled all the White Star bridge components necessary to make the bridge of the Blue Star, the smaller version of the ship that appeared in the series finale of Babylon 5. I decided to take a small working break, and assemble that version of the set and stitch it into Nadab Göksu & William Johansson's Blue Star model. Redoing the surfacing of the Blue Star in PBR also gave me the chance to do some work with the White Star skin surface I'd design with full texture maps and not just a base layer.





I've been idly thinking about, when this is finished, trying to draw up a set of White Star deck-plans. That wireframe of the Blue Star bridge inside of the ship illustrates something I've been thinking on, which is that the bridge of the White Star (and Blue Star) actually only takes up the top half of the bridge module. There's space for an entire extra deck under it.



This is actually really useful. Season 4 added two additional exits at the sides of the bridge just behind the captain's chair, which were confusing since, from the outside, it looks like bridge takes up the whole pod and the only place to go is out the back and down the neck into the rest of the ship. I'm thinking the starboard exit leads to a companionway ladder to the lower level, and the port goes to... a small room of some kind. I'm leaning towards a head, but it could be an office or chart room. I'd thought about it being one of those big-screen viewing rooms we saw on the ship, but even though there were two or three layouts seen over the course of the show, it's a little cramped even for the smallest one. It'd definitely fit on the sub-level though. And it's just occurring to me that having a bunk room down there for standby crew would explain a lot (yes, I have been reading the Excelsior thread in Trek Tech, how did you know?).

For instance, why is no one ever else sleeping in the bunk room aside from, at most, two main characters? Why was Ivanova using the bunk room at the end of season 4 when we saw a couple episode later the White Stars had at least one private stateroom that would, presumably, go to the captain? Okay, that one's a little easier to explain, it was a different ship, and we only ever saw the private room being used by Sheridan and Delenn after they were VIP passengers and not crew, maybe it's a multipurpose room that can be fitted out as a cabin if they're carrying dignitaries (though now I'm wondering if part of the reason Londo and G'Kar were hanging out in the conference room watching the news at the end of "Rising Star" was that they and all the League ambassadors were all supposed to sleep in the bunks, like they were at camp or something, and the two of them would rather stay up and not deal with communal sleeping).

Okay, so, small viewing room, bunk room, maybe an escape pod or two, some kind of chart room or communications station to explain why extras would keep going back and forth between there and the bridge... I don't know why they had to increase the size of the ship again after scaling it up to match the windows, it's plenty of room. He said, hubristically, not yet having tried to model a landing bay that can fit four Minbari fighters.

 

[Redgeneral]

That is nice work on the Whitestar
Here's a blueprint for the command chair area (only a small image unfortunately)

If you are interested in modelling more Babylon 5, I've zipped and uploaded all the babylon 5 blueprint images I have to my google drive

babylon 5.zip

drive.google.com

Although each blueprint set has been sorted into folders, I haven't cleared out duplicates yet.

 

[David cgc]

Thanks! I'm pretty sure I grabbed all the Iacovelli set plans photos from eBay, but now that they're offline, I'm glad to have another source in case I missed anything (though I also haven't finished organizing them, I'd just split them by episode so I wouldn't need to necessarily go through the whole set to find something specific). I hadn't seen that blueprint for the command platform before. It looks like I got things pretty close in the places where I was making educated guesses...



Something I notice in that blueprint, though, is that the arrangement of the control consoles is a little different from the final result. Rather than the smaller consoles being next to the large ones, they're at a perfect right angle, and there's a matching set on the inner railing around the captain's chair. Maybe someone pointed out that giving the captain extra controls off to the side was a little too similar to DS9's Defiant. It's just as well, the three little toggle switches on the armrest apparently do everything you need.

Trying to get the get-up-and-go to cram in the bridge ceiling between being distracted by playing Homeworld 3 (and playing with Homeworld 3's ship models) and playing the Riven remake next week.

 

[ashleytinger]

I've been doing another bine watch of Babylon 5 so seeing this pop up again is joyous. =)

 

[David cgc]

After re-reading it a few times looking for typos, I've finally uploaded my catalog of the White Stars' many bridge variants. There's also a post specifically on the knot-designs used to distinguish different ships in seasons 4 and 5.

The blog post has all the details, but here's the overview of the nine distinct ships I identified in seasons 4 and 5:



Maybe you've noticed my new look recently. I also put up the recreations I did of the White Star knots with glows applied, if you also think they'd make a snazzy avatar. The actual texture maps are channel-packed with the outline and the knot in different colors, so it's simple to customize the colors.



Next up, I think I'll do a little work on the textures before returning to the detail work on the Meditation Room from TRH, the hangar, and the landing gear.

 

[David cgc]

An update? Less than three months after the last one? Truly, this is a day of wonders!

The White Star's texture maps are based on a tiling purple "wave" texture, which was created by Ron Thornton in Kai's Power Tools and eventually laundered into possession of the B5 CG fan-artist community. In fact, here it is in all it's 128x128 pixel glory:


There were sections of the ship that were just this "wave" image map, but for most of the model, there were customized textures with stripes and arcs hand-painted over the purple waves.


These original textures were likewise slipped out to the community, so with all the source material, I can recreate the textures extremely faithfully at a much higher resolution. I'm sticking with my "glasses" philosophy of remastering: By and large, redone visual effects should look more-or-less indistinguishable from the original in the original format, as if you've just put your glasses on and are only now seeing it sharply.

Rather than painting the stripes directly on to the wave texture in Photoshop, I've upscaled the "wave" texture separately using Evil AI Black Magic™, and will be painting the stripes and arcs in a separate image to use as masks. That gives me some versatility in the final look of the texture. I created blue, red, and green variants of the wave texture, and have mixed them together in Lightwave, along with an additional layer for some metallic gold flecks, which I feel are a fun little "physical model" kind of detail that'll look nice in animations. The color variants are being combined using procedural texture masks.

I'm thinking about throwing in some element of randomization into the procedural layers so multiple ships in the same shot have slightly different coloration, but I'll need to learn a bit more about Lightwave's surfacing nodes to figure out if I can do it the way I want. For instance, I don't want the patterns to change if I render an animation across multiple computers, and I'd like to be able to be "consistently random" so I can have one or more specific ships maintain have a constant pattern across different scenes without simply saving multiple versions of the White Star object (which, admittedly, is an option, the main model is only 15 megabytes, it wouldn't be totally impractical to save four or five "hero" White Stars with locked textures and then a general model with the randomization for background ships).

The other issue is that I'm red/green colorblind, so while I'm going for subtle variations, I'm not 100% sure if I'm hitting the mark, since the purple/blue and red/green texture pairs aren't really distinguishable to me once they're all randomly mixed up together, so it's possible they're sticking out a lot more than I intend them to. I'm cross-checking my masking layers a lot and comparing against test-shots I made using the unmodified original wave texture. I think I've got things about where I want to them to be with the wave texture, but I'd like to hear opinions from people with three full sets of cones.

​

The next tricky part is painting the masks. I've got the original textures, and I've got them all layered together on top of the "waves" texture in Photoshop with Difference blends so I can make the hand-painted stripes more visible in my reference layers, but brush size and softness are tricky to match and touch up, so I'm trying to learn more about Photoshop's vector and shape tools in the hopes that I can recreate these patterns non-destructively, and precisely dial in how soft an edge to give the stripes.

Another complication I've noticed is that the "third eye" of the ship, between the two forward canons on top of the head, is hand-painted and doesn't match the wave texture, but I can patch that over when the time comes. Just repeat to yourself, "No one ever needs to see the node graph, no one ever needs to see the node graph..."

 

[publiusr]

I’m color blind too…could not see most of those hidden numbers.

 

[B.J.]

Whoa. I appreciate your attention to detail on this! I honestly had NO idea there were differences between the various White Star bridges, I just thought they reused the set with no changes.

 

[Yuri Nikolayev]

Very nice… great to see Babylon 5 getting some love.