David’s Stargate Stuff

David cgc · Aug 18, 2021

As far as I know (and I really looked) the only canon unique point of origin symbols are Giza, Antarctica, Abydos, and the Gamekeeper’s planet. You can throw in the movie version of the Abydos symbol and the Phoenix site from the new RPG, if you have a broader perspective on what’s official.

I assigned all the recycled origin symbols to the new ones I made up for the model, so if it’s not there, then it wasn’t shown on-screen. I’m sure if you could see an active DHD in any of those episodes closely enough to identify the extra symbol, it’d be noted on the stargate wiki or the RDA site.

Commodore_Sarvour · Aug 18, 2021

I suppose i could make up some Origin Symbols for use in my game.
Question: Do you think Ba'al would use his personal icon as the Origin Symbol for a world he is still in a 'long game' process of conquering (even if it is his main base of operations), or a planet he has 100% control?

David cgc · Aug 18, 2021

Commodore_Sarvour said:
I suppose i could make up some Origin Symbols for use in my game.
Question: Do you think Ba'al would use his personal icon as the Origin Symbol for a world he is still in a 'long game' process of conquering (even if it is his main base of operations), or a planet he has 100% control?

Well, the Ancients built the Stargates, so Ba’al wouldn’t be able to define any origin symbols on his own, he’d just be stuck with what was already there. Maybe he’d find one that coincidentally looked like a symbol associated with him and would move it someplace special, the same way Ra was lucky enough to find a stargate with a triangle on it and held on to it since he had a triangle-shaped spaceship, eventually leaving it on Earth, but it’s not like the Goa’uld were building the things to order.

David cgc · Aug 27, 2021

I continued tweaking the puddle until I was satisfied (and then tweaked it again after it occurred to me that to clip out all the scenes of the effect in the movie so I could see what it was doing for more than a second at a time, at which I realized that it was an overlay of two sets ripples, one expanding outward and and the other retracting inward). Since I've had no joy on getting caustics to do anything in 2020, I exported the puddle object as a LWO2 and loaded it into 2015, where I'm rendering a loop of the caustic lighting, which I'll apply as a projection map to a spotlight. There are pros and cons (pro, the lighting actually looks like real water, con, it won't respond if the ripple pattern changes, neutral, the original didn't respond either, because it was just light reflected off of crinkling mylar), but I'm ready to declare victory unless someone cracks the case of how to make a swimming-pool floor effect in LW2020 (it's the example they use to explain what caustics are in the manual, for crying out loud!).

Next up is the strudel extending out the back, the forming/dissipating effect of the puddle (the movie version is just a slightly fancy radial dissolve), and then I start playing with fluids, dynamics, cloth, volumetric, morphs, and whatever else it takes to get a decent kawoosh.

David cgc · Sep 17, 2021

Had a bit of a slowdown thanks to computer trouble I could no longer forestall after a few hectic... years... and the release of Myst VR (and some subsequent light data-mining), but now I'm back with a spiffy new machine.

First, for reference, the strudel as it appeared in the movie.

And what I've come up with:

It's extremely straightforward. The surfacing is based on what I did for the front of the puddle, with the light refractions faked with gradient shaders remapping the same procedurals that are driving the bump mapping that's pulling actual scene reflections, though, in the case, I used a Crumple and a couple of Cyclone procedurals. Why two Cyclones? Because they don't animate and I though it was too obvious the swirls weren't moving, and overlaying a second on rotating helped. A bit.

The funnel itself is nothing fancy, just a curvy cone with procedural deformations (and an alpha map so that it doesn't deform where it's touching the stargate. The cavitating bubbles gave me some trouble. I tried a particle emitter, but it wouldn't swirl. I tried some dummy objects with mostly-transparent noise textures, but that didn't work. What I settled on was a trail of single-point polygons, with the pixel-size set to a negative so they'd render as tiny spheres instead of points. They were textured with a transparency and a bit of a glow starting at the tail of the vortex then quickly fading down, with a series of procedural clip maps that helps give them the illusion of motion as they pop in and out. I might want to add some more points to get it a little fuzzier, but I feel like the better solution is to just let film grain and bloom settle them in on the real renders.

So, to the kawoosh. I have three ideas for how to do it.

The classic way would be a series of morph targets. I think if I arrange my edge loops right and have enough intermediary morphs, I can get something that gets a little bit of the billowing of the actual effect. I'm not sure how it'll look (at best, probably a lot like this), but the benefit is that I know exactly how to do it on a technical level.

The second idea was to use dynamics. Have a disc object, and use a proxy sphere to punch it outward like a sheet of rubber. I've used Bullet before, but just for colliding objects, not for deformations like that. I did a quick mess-around, but I have not figured out how to make my disc stretchy yet.

The third idea is to use fluids. At first I thought this was doomed to failure; the tricky part about the kawoosh is that it's a negative space, it's not water exploding outward, it's air pushing out water and then the water returning to level. I was thinking that all I would end up would be basically a mold for a kawoosh, all the space around it that isn't part of the shape I want. But I've realized, air is also a fluid, so I would think it should be possible to have my simulated water tank, hit it with a blast of simulated air, and then save and render the solve for the air being blasted into the water and pushed back out. I did walk through LWGuru's video, but it'll take a lot more practice before I really have a sense for this. And my first attempts at running the fluid simulations was painfully slow, even at a lower resolution on my new computer, so I'll need to figure that out, too.

David cgc · Dec 25, 2021

One last update on this for a while. I've been running out of steam on the stargate and finding other projects catching my eye, but I wanted to finish up what I had in progress.

Here's a video comparing the effects in the movie for the kawoosh, strudel, and puddle with my recreations:

And here's a blog post with all the details and a download link. Lightwave only, this time, because it's all weird animations and procedural textures, and I don't think anything would translate out if I tried.

David cgc · Nov 15, 2022

I decided to start some much-belated animated renders of the model to put into my reel. I decided I needed to gussy it up a bit and started building some accessaries, including the SG-1/Atlantis version of the puddle.

I was hoping to do it entirely in-camera, but I don't think that's possible in modern Lightwave. The cheat I came up with before (ramping up the reflectivity up to something like 10,000% as it approached the center of the disc) doesn't work in the physically-based renderer, and any other tricks I've tried also haven't worked (the fake shimmers I used on the movie version are too solid and harsh to match the softer TV look). What I'm leaning towards is doing a pre-render of the highlights and general reflections from a fractal turbulence noise map, and applying that to an object that has a low-spec, high-roughness version of the surface, so the puddle can have some change in lighting depending on its environment. I'll have to do some experiments to dial that in. Right now, the fresnel effect is driving me crazy, if you're looking at the puddle edge-on, no matter what I do to the settings, it almost always turns into a near-perfect mirror. I just want a little bit of a subtle color tint, the kind of thing a compositor would do on the show to help set the element into the filmed scene, not something as reflective as the movie version.

Though if I am pre-rendering it, I think I'm going to take one more try at shining the light through a transparent version, of having it show up as a reflection.

Anyway, I think I've gotten the basic elements more-or-less down in terms of color, proportion, and timing. This video compares my current version (on the left) to a render used on the shows for their "practical" puddle effect (right), which was projected on to a screen mounted inside the stargate setpiece. I'm trying to match a slightly later version of the effect, from the first episode of Stargate Universe, so that's why I've got smaller ripples and it's a bit darker towards the edges.

I'm also not super-satisfied with the shape and movement of the ripples overall, but Lightwave's "Ripples" procedural only has so many options (I'm actually using five levels of it to help break up the pattern further). I tried the water wave textures from Denis Pontonnier's Renderman shader ports, but those were totally off. I do wish someone had ever talked about the nuts-and-bolts of how the puddle was done for the shows. The main vendor the shows used seemed to have it nailed down by season 3 of SG-1 (you could always tell when another VFX house had to do the effect for an episode), but I don't think I've ever even seen someone say what program was used, never mind any kind of detailed description of the settings.

David cgc · Nov 18, 2022

I nailed down the split between which parts to prerender and which parts to have as part of the main object's texturing; the white highlights and reflective ripples are all going to be done in advance, while the soft central glow and a small amount of diffuse color will be in the scene object; it gets a little over-the-top in direct sunlight, but it's normally a very subtle influence from the environment's colors. I ran off a test render, but I forgot to check the compression settings when outputting an animation directly, so it's pretty crunchy. It's enough to give you an idea of how the puddle texture interacts with the lighting environment, both on the opaque front and the translucent back.

I'm also prerendering the caustics in Lightwave 2015 on a spare computer, just like I had to do for the movie version. I have an idea I wanted to try out; I wasn't able to get quite as much scene interaction in the puddle as I wanted while still preserving the SG-1 "look," because it always got too reflective looking at the puddle edge-on (thanks for nothing, Augustin-Jean Fresnel), but I did want to also add a subtle prismatic effect on the highlights. I don't think that kind of effect is built in to Lightwave 2020, but I think I can fake it by having three lights (or three image notes in the texture) splitting out the red, green, and blue channels, and having them at slightly different spotlight angles (or sizes), similar to how I'd fake chromatic aberration in After Effects. I'll give that a try, see if it looks good or its better to just have the puddle highlights and the spotlight coming out of it as a plain blue.

EDIT: And here's a test of the prismatic effect. It's more successful with the light being projected on the wall than it is on the actual puddle, where it would only be visible on the edge, and it's clearly red, green, blue and not a full rainbow. The projection mixes more smoothly, and the individual colors appear in spots throughout the projection

David cgc · Dec 1, 2022

The SG-1 and Atlantis versions are still in-progress (I'm pretty happy with how the puddle turned out, and I was able to figure out a better way to introduce a slight prismatic effect to it by splitting out the light channels when I pre-rendered the highlights, rather than when I was applying the texture), but I've just posted a showcase animation for the movie version of the stargate.

David cgc · Jan 17, 2023

Renders have been continuing for the SG-1 and Atlantis versions of the animation in the prior post. There was a little bit of a delay as I revised the ripple animation on the event horizon to try to hide a sort of "pulsating" effect from the intersecting ripple-loops, and since that's all pre-rendered, that stacked up even more time, plus the surfacing of the SG-1 and SGA gates are much more complex and deeply layered than the movie version, so they take longer to render even without the puddle.

This is why Donny does everything in video game engines, no waiting around for weeks on renders there. Real-time is the way of the future, and I've got to get in on it... eventually.

I do think I'll probably take yet another whack at the TV puddle. I still can't get those ripples right, but the trouble is, if I replace them with a texture that doesn't loop, I'm going to have other issues, even if I can get the hotspots to appear "in-camera" the way I could for the movie version, since I can't get the caustics to render live.

In the meantime, I've done some other work on this. I made another platform, this one based on production art, but I don't think it was actually built. The drawing describes a quarter-scale stargate miniature with a removable base. The stargate itself probably was built, I think it was used for the first few shots in the syndication opening credits for the first five seasons, but I've never seen any evidence of the base. So, I modeled it off the drawings, and I tried out a few different material options.

I also started in on modeling the DHD, but that has a really weird shape that scares me and I haven't had time to put in fighting with it to figure out how to properly negotiate it. Then I looked at doing the power-pods from the Atlantis space-gates, and while those are clearly a very quick-and-dirty modeling job, I couldn't figure out how they were actually put together, either, so I put them aside and started working on another project I back-burnered that didn't have any pressing 3D modeling needs.

Since I'm such a sticker about stargates having unique origin symbols, it bothers me a little that in seasons 4 and 5, when the show switched to using a different stargate, that wasn't reflected in any way on the set or branding, even though it was one of the few stargates they had established a unique symbol for. I've got a dream of a fan-edit where I'd paint out and replace the incorrect symbol in every episode (luckily, despite the show being named "Stargate," they spend surprisingly little time looking at stargates). One early step would be to update the opening credits.

I mentioned earlier that the first half of the show had "syndication" opening credits. That was a bunch of clips, apparently made early in production of season 2, that was used when the show was in re-runs. For the first-run of the episodes on Showtime, they just used the opening sequence of the movie, a slow pan over an Egyptian bust, which didn't fit very well with the more action-y version of the theme music. Oddly enough, on DVD, only the first three seasons use the syndication credits, with season 4 and 5 switching to the boring one, as originally broadcast. I'm not sure why, the only explanation I've ever heard is very, very stupid (apparently, in the DVD commentary for the season 3 finale, the writers reference the bust-credits directly, so the first-run version of the episode was used on the disc, and then they never switched back for the next two seasons of DVDs).

Anyway, my idea is to go back in time, and imagine what if they decided to edit up a revised opening sequence reflection that they had a new stargate, and Daniel had a new haircut, and they had some fresher clips of the cast doing cool stuff. In my mind, this was made during post-production of the season 4 premiere. It's pretty directly based on the original syndication credits (similar to how season 6-8 and 9-10 had distinct styles though they were revised every year as the cast changed), but has a few aspects that are drawn from the following season 6-8 version (mostly because I needed to steal the team walking through the stargate at the end from the season 7/8 sequence, so I had to match the typography from those years). Most of the shots are from season 3, since I wanted Daniel and Sam to have their season 3 haircuts, and I most assuredly did not want Teal'c to have his season 4.0 haircut.

Now, this is a rough draft. I'm pretty happy with the editing (but I'll accept criticism, it's not my core competency), but all the new effects work is incomplete. I'll talk about those after you watch it. First, the real-life season 1-5 opening credits:

And now, my rough draft of the imaginary season 4-5 opening credits:

So, what's still on the table:

In place of the blue-black void the opening pans are shot against, I'm going to have the Atlantis gate-room visible, albeit dark and out-of-focus, in the background of the opening shots. My head-canon is that the pans in the original credits are of the Giza stargate in ancient Egypt, so these would be of the Antarctic stargate when it was new, with the idea that the audience would only realize what the background was later, once the Atlantis spin-off came along. I'm about halfway done modeling a very rough Atlantis gate-room, just the parts immediately behind and to the sides of the stargate.
That shot of O'Neill standing in front of an off-world stargate has the ᐰ symbol pretty prominently visible. Going to paint that out and replace it with a fictitious origin symbol.
The transition for the Antarctic origin-symbol to the activating stargate is going to be a lot more artful. Sort of a gradual cross-fade, starting with the lit chevrons, then the kawoosh starts to form and the SGC gateroom fades in around it while you're distracted. I just hacked the together quickly for timing.
I really hate that shot of the SGC stargate activating from the side, which isn't fun, because it's probably the most-used piece of stock footage over the run of the show. It's from the pilot, so it's before they figured out exactly how they wanted all the VFX to look stylistically, it's a weird lumpy kawoosh element they never used again, you can see the open ceiling of the set, the lights on the ramp are turned off, the ultra-wide camera lens looks weird... I'm going to take that bad boy into After Effects and I'm just going to rip it apart and put it back together.
It's not as prominent, but the ᐰ symbol is visible in the closing shot of the team walking toward the stargate. I'll paint that one out, too.

blssdwlf · Jan 18, 2023

That looks promising. I don't know if you'd do better using UE to create the effects as there are alot of shortcuts (shadows, etc) being used to get the real-time playback. You could speed up your productivity by moving away from Lightwave's native cpu render engine and switch to a GPU-renderer for Lightwave or a different program altogether.

Mage · Jan 18, 2023

Your work is really spectacular!

Gepard · Jan 19, 2023

The stylized-A point of origin symbol is just too aesthetic for me to support replacing. However:

David cgc said:
The transition for the Antarctic origin-symbol to the activating stargate is going to be a lot more artful. Sort of a gradual cross-fade, starting with the lit chevrons, then the kawoosh starts to form and the SGC gateroom fades in around it while you're distracted. I just hacked the together quickly for timing.

Even as a pure match cut, that transition is very cool.

Some other thoughts:

It feels odd to maintain the original point-of-origin in the title font if it's not part of the series any more. Not sure what you might do otherwise, but I noticed it.
Speaking of match cuts, I think the shots you chose for Carter and Daniel especially are too static; it's just one cut after another of inert head shots. Something I think the syndicated credits did well was alternating shots that were very static with shots that had some movement (probably the best example being Daniel doing the run-n-slide from There but for the Grace of God). I'd suggest mixing it up some more.
Full support for replacing the scale model Stargate with your CG model. Perhaps you should look into redoing the seasons 9 and 10 credits? The CG model they used for those was dreadful.
I'm pretty sure you're aware of this from the Lightwave Salvation Facebook group, but now that Octane has a free single GPU option for LW, perhaps that's worth looking into?

David cgc · Jan 19, 2023

Gepard said:
Even as a pure match cut, that transition is very cool.

Thanks! It'll probably depend on how much I can get away with using a quick-and-dirty Gateroom, but I'm also considering just overlaying a stargate floating in space, a la the short-lived short-length season 9 opening titles.

(Or, if that's too potato-quality, here's a fan-made recreation by EagleSG)

It feels odd to maintain the original point-of-origin in the title font if it's not part of the series any more. Not sure what you might do otherwise, but I noticed it.

Like you said earlier, it's the signature branding element of the franchise. Both Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe used the ᐰ in their logotypes (I'm pretty sure that's an official variant logotype for SGU, it doesn't look fan-made, but I'm having trouble running down the provenance). Even the on-screen titles for SGU, which used a different front with a squared-off "A" that couldn't be adapted into the symbol, still alluded it to it by using a "•" as a ":"

Even if I do fan-edit both seasons eventually and replace the ᐰ on the stargate and dialing computer wherever it shows up, it's still in the SGC logo on the conference room plaque and screensaver, and it's still on the shoulder-patches; in-universe and out, it remains a signature element of the show, and, with hindsight, we know the Antarctic Stargate is the Jonas Quinn of stargates, only appearing for two seasons mid-run plus a couple of one-offs.

Speaking of match cuts, I think the shots you chose for Carter and Daniel especially are too static; it's just one cut after another of inert head shots. Something I think the syndicated credits did well was alternating shots that were very static with shots that had some movement (probably the best example being Daniel doing the run-n-slide from There but for the Grace of God). I'd suggest mixing it up some more.

You're not wrong. I had a lot of trouble finding shots of Daniel and Carter doing stuff on their own circa season 3 where they weren't sharing focus with another character. Even finding reaction shots where they weren't talking was surprisingly tricky. I'll scrub through the episodes again, see if something leaps out at me.

Full support for replacing the scale model Stargate with your CG model. Perhaps you should look into redoing the seasons 9 and 10 credits? The CG model they used for those was dreadful.

Oh, I've wanted to do that since season 9 first came out, my old stargate was better than that one. I've already clipped out all the CG stargate shots from the 9/10 titles for reference, so I just need to actually animate the camera. The part that gives me pause is how much of the show-off flashy compositing I'd have to redo, and I'd be in real trouble if any of the hero-shots of the characters were trims that weren't actually in any episodes. My plan was actually to just put the raw renders up on Vimeo and hope someone who likes fancy compositing would try to rebuild the main titles. That reminds me, I've also got a half-finished graphics package of stargate shots I need to figure out how to put on-line for fan projects to use.

A couple fun-facts about the model-stargate montage I didn't mention before. I haven't found an on-line version of the full-frame version of the credits to confirm, but I'm pretty sure the montage was shot in 4x3 and stretched to 16x9 for the widescreen cut of the show. When I was trying to match the angles, nothing came close until is squished them down into a square. Also, somewhere in the original syndication credits, there's a missing frame error because a cross-fade went on a tick too long. The pros really are just like us.

I'm pretty sure you're aware of this from the Lightwave Salvation Facebook group, but now that Octane has a free single GPU option for LW, perhaps that's worth looking into?

blssdwlf said:
That looks promising. I don't know if you'd do better using UE to create the effects as there are alot of shortcuts (shadows, etc) being used to get the real-time playback. You could speed up your productivity by moving away from Lightwave's native cpu render engine and switch to a GPU-renderer for Lightwave or a different program altogether.

I am looking at Octane Prime, it seems like a good way to split the difference between learning something modern and transferable without restarting from scratch or buying a used-car worth of subscription software. The free LW edition of Octane that was posted recently is only available for Windows, though. I found an older version of the plug-in for Mac under the "Prime" license, and installed it last night and got as far as hitting F9 and seeing the fancy Octane render-in-progress window. It appears to be on a 30-day trial, but judging from a screenshot from someone using the Windows LW Prime plug-in, that's what it's supposed to look like, I guess the "trial period" will just restart at the end.

blssdwlf · Jan 19, 2023

Wow, that is cool that Otoy is offering a free LW edition. Bummer it is only for Windows. There appears to be an Octane X PR 11 version when looking in the downloads for LW for MacOS (Metal).
The amount of documentation/tutorials for LW+Octane are a bit outdated and scarce. Hopefully you'll get enough info to be able to recreate the effect without too much effort in Octane.

David cgc · Jan 19, 2023

Yeah, I've fiddled with the older Octane plug-in that's available a bit this morning, tried downloading demo scenes, and nothing seems to actually work, I hit "render" and nothing actually renders. I'm not sure if that's the old plug-in's fault, or if I've missed some aspect of set-up, I'll actually follow along with the "Getting Started" documentation and videos I've seen posted this evening and see if I have better luck.

blssdwlf · Jan 19, 2023

David cgc said:
Yeah, I've fiddled with the older Octane plug-in that's available a bit this morning, tried downloading demo scenes, and nothing seems to actually work, I hit "render" and nothing actually renders. I'm not sure if that's the old plug-in's fault, or if I've missed some aspect of set-up, I'll actually follow along with the "Getting Started" documentation and videos I've seen posted this evening and see if I have better luck.

If you're getting a blank screen you'll need to setup Octane's render target... Hit Open Editor in Render Target and add some basic nodes to connect to the Octane RenderTarget node. You should then see your objects with no texture. Then you'll need to convert the materials over to Octane materials and lights.

edit: I'm assuming the Mac version is similar to Windows. Hopefully it is close enough.

David cgc · Jan 19, 2023

It's a good guess, but the demo scenes I downloaded from Otoy already had those nodes set up.

It looks like I might be SOL on Octane. There seems to be some kind of driver issue with my card (AMD Radeon Pro 5700 XT), recent versions of macOS, and Octane. The upshot seems to be that the Octane plug-in doesn't think I have a GPU, or at least that my GPU doesn't have a processor or RAM.

I'm very confused by all of this. The Octane documentation says my card is supported. On the off chance this was because I was using a two-year-old release of the plug-in, and to see if there was any point to asking for a Mac version of the Lightwave EOL release, I downloaded the standalone Octane renderer from the Mac App Store, and that seems to have the same issue, reporting I have "no render GPUs." I've seen enough contradictory sources that I have no idea if my computer is too old or my OS is too new.

I think I'm going to put Octane back on the shelf and try it again next time the MAS version updates. When that works, I'll fire up the Lightwave plugin again and give that a shot.

blssdwlf · Jan 20, 2023

That's a bummer your GPU isn't being recognized.

David cgc · Jan 20, 2023

I'm just glad it occurred to me to try the standalone version. Given how Apple has been promoting Octane recently, it stands to reason that if any version of it was going to work, it'll be that one. If I didn't, I might still be trying all sorts of weird stuff to coax it.

I dropped back in to Premiere and took into account Gepard's crits, swapping in some different clips for Sam and Daniel, and making a few other tweaks. Still not sure about those two, but my sense of editing-rhythm has always been a little weak. I'll have plenty of time to fiddle with it before all the CG is done, at least.

David’s Stargate Stuff

Admiral

Lieutenant

Admiral

Admiral

Admiral

Admiral

Admiral

Admiral

Admiral

Admiral

Rear Admiral

Vice Admiral

Vice Admiral

Admiral

Rear Admiral

Admiral

Rear Admiral

Admiral

Rear Admiral

Admiral

Similar threads

We value your privacy