Starship design history in light of Discovery
- Thread starter INACTIVEUSS Einstein
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I know. But the thing is: I'm okay with the lightning being off when they were using models on a television budget in the 90s. And while I think TMP still has the very best space scenes of all of Trek, even DS9 managed to create a much more "realistic" space look, even while using models.
But now we are living in a post-nuBattlestar Galactica world! The shows to compare DIS to are not VOY, DS9 or Stargate anymore, not even Firefly, but BSG, the Expanse, nuLost in Space, ....
And guess what: They all do exceptionally better. In each of these shows, they manage to create a unique but realistic "space look". But DIS space shots still work as if they were using models - very similar to "The Orville" - only that the Orville is better rendered.
I dunno -- I'm certainly not a fan of Discovery's space FX shots, but I guess I just haven't registered the lighting as being one of their problems. The problem is that they're too cluttered and fanciful and garish, and that the people making them can't be bothered to do two minutes of astronomy research to find out what color an O star is or what would exist 100 AUs from the Sun. To me, the dim lighting is the only thing they get remotely close to right.
Audiences are becoming more space literate as well. We've seen a sports car vaulted on live HD streaming to the asteroid belts. We can get a live view off the space station any time we want. We've seen detailed photos of every planet in the solar system + Pluto and Ceres. Star Trek Discovery is off the tail end of one form of science fiction filming vs newer shows and movies that must take this space literacy into account like Interstellar, Gravity, and the Expanse (and lurking much further back, 2001 and 2010).
I think the FX people for Discovery and their direction has been trying to find a balance in that. They oddly went for "let's make space look like Bob Ross painted it" in some cases. It's very stylistic. I don't dislike it, but I'm getting older, set in my ways, and I like my space black with white dots and lots of inexplicable ambient lighting. I admit it.
I think the FX people for Discovery and their direction has been trying to find a balance in that. They oddly went for "let's make space look like Bob Ross painted it" in some cases. It's very stylistic. I don't dislike it, but I'm getting older, set in my ways, and I like my space black with white dots and lots of inexplicable ambient lighting. I admit it.
I couldn't disagree more. I think the new FX people have gone in exactly the opposite direction, portraying space far more fancifully than Star Trek has ever done before, as this garish, cluttered fantasy realm that bears no resemblance to anything remotely real.
The lighting is part and parcel of the garishness. Like, how weirdly colorful and cluttered the hulls of all the ships look? That's from an overabundance of specular reflection, which in the CG world is part of the lighting, and in terms of the real world comes from objects reflecting bright light sources in their environment. There is no way that an object in deep space could look like that because there's nothing out there for it to reflect. Especially given how dim the diffuse lighting is – where are all these colorful rim lights and reflections coming from? Makes it look tawdry and cheap.
I'm confused. I thought the complaint was that the lighting was too dim.
It's both. There's two components to lightng in CG, diffuse illumination and specular reflection. Diffuse lightng is what you see on, say, an object sprayed with flat gray primer – it's that dull, omnidirectional reflection where light scatters off a surface that let's you see the contours of the object. Specular reflection is the mirror-like quality that gives highlights on glossy objects. In real life, these qualities are of course one and the same; in general, the more light rays are reflected as specular reflection, the less are reflected as diffuse. (Perfect specular reflection is a mirror, like chrome.)
But for the sake of control, in CG the two are separated into interrelated but unique settings. So with the DSC ships, there's a couple of things happening:
1.) Very little diffuse illumination. This is what people are reacting to when they say the ships are underlit. Traditional Star Trek ship shots (and indeed all the old motion control miniature work for Star Wars, BSG, etc) blasted the models with strong direct illumination that, coupled with the matte finish of the models, gave strong diffuse lighting with little to no specularity. That's what people are used to and DSC doing it differently looks "wrong."
2.) Bright specular reflections. The Motion Picture refit model of the Enterprise had noticable specularity on the pearlescent azteking, but that's about as specular as Trek ships ever got. (And it was eliminated in TWOK onward because ILM repainted the model.) DSC takes the pearlescent specularity of the TMP Enterprise and cranks it up to 11. Here's where it runs into problems, in my opinion, because in reality those kinds of reflections require light sources just off-camera for the model to reflect, but where are they coming from in DSC? They're bright and garish and out of step with how under-illuminated the rest of the space shots are. And more specifically, if there's really bright lights near the ship for the hull to reflect, there should be more diffuse illumination than there is; the Discovery's hull is not a mirror, so more light should be reaching the camera as diffuse given how strong the reflections are.
They also don't vary the way the ships are lit regardless of environment; the USS Discovery in orbit around a planet is just as deficent on diffuse illumination and overeliant on specularity as it is in the deep space shots, despite the fact that it should look more like the ISS upthread, with strong diffuse lighting. That bothers the heck out of me.
(Edit: I should also mention that specular reflection, unlike diffuse, is highly variable with viewing angle. With the right combination of surface properties, lights, and camera angles it's not impossible to capture something in real life that looks the way the USS Discovery looks in an average season 1 establishing shot. But what you can't do is move the camera around and still have an object that reflects all those specular highlights back at the camera. So a shot like the very first view of the Discovery in the third episode, where the camera orbits around the length of the ship and its contours stay illuminated from stem to stern with specular reflection is... implausible, to say the least.)
The TL;DR is that there's two aspects to how light interacts with objects in the real world and because CG has separated them into discrete controls, it's possible to abuse the lighting tools to create exaggerated lighting setups that you would rarely see in real life.
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This explanation deserves a 'bravo!'
But, but, Discovery has a 'special hull' of spinny magicness. We just don't know what the shrooms do to the metal to make it so shiney.
Not only that, but Klingons will have no ridges and they will also be shaved again.
Yes, but not up there.
Well, there's an image I never thought I'd imagine.
I mean, imagine having to shave around 2...
But wasn't the complaint during TNG and other shows that the ship was unrealistically well lit? Middle of space, no nearby light source and a day-glo ship.
Oh definitely. It's impossible for deep space. But it's not physically impossible at a basic level like some of the lighting on Discovery has been.
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Kinda. In these shows the ship always looked like it was close to celestial bodies (planets, or suns) that emit a lot of light. Not entirely unreasonable most of the time (to "park" your ship in an orbit, rather than just float between the stars), but they didn't differentiate between when a ship was in orbit, in a nebula, or in deep space. IMO not a problem considering the technology and budget at the time.
Again: The one movie that IMO did it the best is still TMP, with it's self-illumination, and clearly different lightning in between orbits and in dark nebula. Though of course still not "perfect" realism, it's probably the closest we ever got.
As for a new space shows, Netflix' Lost in Space reboot has fantastic space scenes.
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