Mkay, made some lighting tweaks, rendered her with linear response and gamma 2.2, encoded the video for sRGB. Closer?
Direct link to video
Direct link to video
So, I made this.
- Thread starter Professor Moriarty
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The ship looks right on the money to me. The sunlight is bright enough to seem realistic, and the shadows dark enough to suggest space, while still having enough fill to get the shape of the ship and that Trekkian, less-than-hyper-real look. The phases look a bit faded and purplish to me instead of that vibrant electric blue from earlier, but I'm colorblind, so what do I know.
Ack, you’re right. Actually, the entire video is being slightly desaturated by the encoding process on Vimeo, but extra-dim and extra-bright light sources (i.e., the stars in the background and the phaser bolts) are especially affected. The Enterprise looks pretty much exactly like she looks in the raw assets and the composited MP4 video on my desktop (the version sent to Vimeo that gets encoded again).
TBH I haven’t dug into optimizing for Vimeo nearly as much as I have for YouTube, so it looks like I’ve also got some tweaking to do on that end. Grr.
TBH I haven’t dug into optimizing for Vimeo nearly as much as I have for YouTube, so it looks like I’ve also got some tweaking to do on that end. Grr.
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). It has a good reflection like the episodes and not that CGI gray of TOSR. It's got good sense of depth and doesn't seem pasted on and flat. Well done!
Thanks! Amazing what repositioning the lights and adjusting their intensity will do for a model.
Some other tweaks, in no particular order:
(edited to replace original still image capture with a higher-quality copy)
Some other tweaks, in no particular order:
- Adjusted the gamma on the star background to help the foreground blend in better. (Once I finish working on—ahem—another model needed for this show, the backgrounds won’t be quite as boring
) - Upped the lower bound threshold for glare and bloom on foreground objects. Point lights on the Enterprise still have a nice glow, but indirect light bouncing off the hull has a much lower bloom than before. (Side benefit: the actinic phaser bolts stand even more.)
- Discovered that the brushed metal diffuse map was being used instead of the brushed metal normal map on the Normal Chanel for most of the secondary hull surfaces; fixed that. (@blssdwlf, this is probably what you noticed.)
- Added a new metallic mesh surface material to the warp drive Bussard collectors. Not precisely (or at all) canon, but it gives some visual interest to those huge (and otherwise featureless) domes when motion blur isn’t obscuring the detail, and it adds that last bit of light refraction and dispersion that I couldn’t quite achieve with glass material alone. I think this is the closest that I’ve come to replicating the look of the original warp effect.
(edited to replace original still image capture with a higher-quality copy)
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You're definitely on to something here!
At first I was a little off-put by it, but then I realized that was your GIF of the animation. (sorry, this has been a long week and it's only Tuesday 
)
Yeah, this is much better!
)Yeah, this is much better!
Yeah, the GIFs are fun but they can really flatten an image (a GIF an only have up to 255 different colors).At first I was a little off-put by it, but then I realized that was your GIF of the animation. (sorry, this has been a long week and it's only Tuesday
Yeah, this is much better!
Thank you for the feedback everyone!!
Decent work.
I’ll take decent! 
But let’s see if I can do better.
Lots of updates on this one:
But let’s see if I can do better.Lots of updates on this one:
- The phaser bolts now visibly detach from the Enterprise and fly away when they’re terminated, like they do in TOS. Completely unrealistic to be able to see this, scientifically-speaking, but it looks better. In this test video, the port bolt flies away slightly faster than the starboard bolt; I was testing to see which looked better. I vote for port
(BTW, there is a rigging error at the very end of the video that causes a weird “shimmer” in front of the phaser turrets; the root cause has already been identified and corrected for future videos.) - And speaking of phaser turrets... the beam emitters are no longer featureless mirrored panels; they are now modeled phaser cannons on articulated armatures that extend the weapons out from behind sliding doors. I haven’t finished rigging this action just yet, so in this video the cannons are extended into their firing positions for the duration of the clip. If you freeze-frame as the Enterprise rumbles past the camera, you can just barely make out that the turrets are similar in design to the artillery laser cannon seen in the TOS pilot episode “The Cage”.
- The sound effects for the phasers are in stereo, and the starboard phaser has a slightly different pitch.
- The color temperature and power of the phaser beams fluctuate slightly while they’re firing.
- You can’t really see it here, but the deflector dish now has a mesh-like surface that looks more like a real-world astronomical space telescope dish seen up close. From a distance or when the ship is in motion the dish looks pretty much like it does in TOS; this change was made only for when the Enterprise is sitting for her portrait.
- The sequence was shot with aperture settings adjusted to induce a slight depth of field, which is more noticeable as the Enterprise gets closer to the camera (the nacelles go slightly out of focus while the secondary hull remains sharp).
- The entire composition was slightly desaturated and had film grain applied (too much, I think).
Still looks damn good!
Sound-effect-wise, it might give the phaser volley more punch if it took half a second for it to “rev up,” to generate the terrifying amounts of power blasting forward at light speed completely annihilating anything in their path.
You saw/heard this on TNG as the main phaser worked its way around the saucer and built up to the point of release. I’m not suggesting as long as that here (to keep with TOS’s more instantaneous fire where’s TNG I think could milk it when they wanted to), but a bit.
You saw/heard this on TNG as the main phaser worked its way around the saucer and built up to the point of release. I’m not suggesting as long as that here (to keep with TOS’s more instantaneous fire where’s TNG I think could milk it when they wanted to), but a bit.
The original (un-remastered) TOS phaser effects were all over the map. Years ago I did a survey of all the different versions:
- In "The Corbomite Maneuver", they were a messy spray of deep red beams (but with some nice glow).
- In "Balance of Terror", the "phasers" were actually photon torpedoes by any other name.
- In "Arena", the red beams were back but the glow was not, and the effects were very sloppily composited (the phasers looked like they were being fired from somewhere in the vicinity of deck 7). At least "photon torpedoes" were now a separate thing.
- In "The Alternative Factor", phaser beams were blue for the first time. (Or I should say beam, since there was only one fired on the Lazarus continua-craft.)
- In "Who Mourns for Adonais", we were back to red beams again with no glow, but with a hotter "core" (kind of like neon tubing). The same effect (and I'm fairly certain the same footage) was used again for "The Apple" and for the third season episode "Whom Gods Destroy".
- In "The Doomsday Machine", the damn things changed color AGAIN to yellow/orange and lost their hotter "core", leaving them looking like giant, solid No. 2 pencils. (This and the low-detail Constellation were the two things that irked me enough to take up this hobby and try doing something about it!)
- In "Journey to Babel" we finally got what (for me) was the hands-down ne plus ultra version of the Enterprise phaser effect: blue beams, with a nice bit of glow. To this day I still remember my first glimpse of the Enterprise... it was this image, on the cover of The Making of Star Trek, that I stared at for a good five minutes in a Dallas Waldenbooks store
- With the exception of "Whom Gods Destroy", the glowy blue phasers were the effect of choice for the remainder of the series. (Unfortunately, it was always the exact same footage from "Babel"; there were no new VFX of the Enterprise firing her phasers created after that episode.)
I can't adjust the phaser velocity without re-rendering but I think you're right, they need to be a little "faster". I can (and have) re-comped the video without the desaturation and film grain, though. (I really liked what @scifieric posted the other day with his Enterprise and wanted to see what a little less color and more film grain would look like on my model; well now we know!) Anyway, here it is:
When I redid this, I also experimented with trying to adjust the phaser glow in DaVinci Resolve Fusion. I've decided the phasers look too turbulent; they need to be a little less "particle-y" and with a hotter core. Unfortunately, this is about the best I can manage in post-processing; my attempts to make the core of the beams hot enough to hide the bumpiness made them too "fat". I'm afraid that further tweaks require just doing them over. But... I think this looks better than the video from earlier this evening.
(edited to add replies to these comments...)
Ooooh, that's an interesting idea! Thanks
Oh yes, absolutely. The phaser switch firing effect was only added at the beginning of these videos for fun.
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You, Sir, are a VERY kind man! Excellent work!
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