The D7 Klingon Battle Cruiser in "Elaan" Remastered...Yea? Or Nay?

[cooleddie74]

I don't have the folder pics to post any shots of the Remastered D7 cruiser from this past weekend's "Elaan of Troyius" re-do, but if anyone here can post some appropriate and clear screen shots of the ship(especially in close-up and with details)I'd be very appreciative. So...yea? Or nay? Or somewhere in between? Did you like the job the TOS Remastering team did on the D7 battle cruiser in this episode and its more intricate surface detailing and features?

 

[Michael]

I only have seen the FX reel on TrekMovie.com, so I don't know how representative that is. But I thought it looked too undetailed and lacked some real texture. Also, the movements were too fast and it appeared much too agile (for lack of a better word). The ship didn't really feel heavy.

 

[Michael]

Here are the screenshots from TrekMovie.com:

What's up with this weapon effect?

 

[cooleddie74]

^
This...I liked. A lot. The windows and portholes were good enough for my tastes even if they clashed with the way they look on other D7 models in past episodes and incarnations.

^
I would have SO wanted a rear/aft torpedo tube back here. Even 22nd century prequel cruisers(the D6 as it is sometimes called and as seen in "Unexpected" on ENT)had them, as do later post-TOS D7 and K'tinga cruisers from ST:TMP onwards. They missed a real opportunity to make the rear section of the ship look more detailed and establish continuity with ships before and after this one.

 

[cooleddie74]

This is something I would have ditched. The whole disruptor/plasma-looking bolts-from-the-nacelles thingy. It didn't look good in the original 1968 opticals and effects and makes less sense now that we know that D7 battle cruisers DON'T have disruptor banks and emitters on or above their warp nacelles. They should have had the cruiser fire orange or red torpedoes from its forward launch tube a'la TMP or STAR TREK VI. Something that fits in with established Klingon weapon usage and the blueprints and designs of this ship.

I love the Remastering team and their work most of the time...but they ARE too damn slavish to the original effects they're replacing, even if they looked stupid and illogical. They should be more original and stretch themselves. Not robotically recreate so many original opticals to the letter.

 

[payndz201]

It looks... plastic.

Sometimes CBS Digital can get the lighting spot-on. More often than not, they make their CG models look like actual models - as in, about a foot long and made from styrene. Which is what happened here. There's no weight to it, no sense of sheer size. It's meant to be on a par with the Enterprise in dimensions, but it doesn't look it, especially in motion.

Greg Jein's D7 from 'Trials And Tribble-ations' looked much better, even if its surface detail and colouring was more like the movie ships than the original model.

 

[Outpost4]

I reserve judgement. These screen caps look like shit. The Klingon battlecruiser looked better live when I watched it on TV.

Having seen the Enterprise model look outstanding on the HD DVDs or from the HD caps on TrekCore, I'll wait until I see this version of the D7 in hi-def. Too bad I'll probably have to wait a year.

Hey, CBS Digital, slip a real HD picture of your D7 render to TrekMovie, would ya?

 

[Maurice]

I dislike this model. The portholes are too big. The impulse engine ports are just slapped on and don't feel like they belong where they are, and the texturing is generic.

The worst thing: this model looks REALLY low-poly...where there should be curves I can see straight lines (look under the central impulse vents in the aft shot). It honestly looks like a low-poly videogame model.

The weapons effect feels like another plugin. You don't need to add all this particle and cloud nonsense to energy weapons effects. Notice that the Star Wars prequel films still keep their blaster beams as simple hot lines...and no one complained that those looked old fashioned.

For a ship that appears in several episodes this one got a poor treatment.

 

[NCC621]

Overall, not bad. The textures could use more work. I'm glad that they resisted the temptation to add surface detail like the Klingon ships in TMP. I'm also glad they kept the disruptors firing from the nacelles.

 

[Cyrus]

These screen caps look like shit. The Klingon battlecruiser looked better live when I watched it on TV.

It always looks better on screen. Is trekmovie.com getting their screencaps from a digital channel or an analog channel? It wouldn't look good if it's not from a digital channel.

The Klingon ship looked fine to me, not too great but not bad either. But I agree that any final judgment should be based on the HD version. I am hoping that they will sell the series to HDNet or Sci-Fi next year, so we can see it in HD.

 

[Lieut. Arex]

This is something I would have ditched. The whole disruptor/plasma-looking bolts-from-the-nacelles thingy. It didn't look good in the original 1968 opticals and effects and makes less sense now that we know that D7 battle cruisers DON'T have disruptor banks and emitters on or above their warp nacelles. They should have had the cruiser fire orange or red torpedoes from its forward launch tube a'la TMP or STAR TREK VI. Something that fits in with established Klingon weapon usage and the blueprints and designs of this ship.

How the *@#%& can you say "we know" battlecruisers' don't have disruptors on the tips of their warp nacelles when the fire from there in this episode? indeed.

This is the show which first established where any weapons mount might be on this ship. Anything after this is a change or at best an addition from established Klingon weapon usage and placement, none of it invalidates what is seen in this show or on this ship. The latter shows and films all feature different classes of ship. How can their weapons packages or placement have any bearing on the original battlecruiser design? The K't'inga's from TMP represent an upgrade of this ship comparable to the Refit's of the Constitution, with the added torpedoes aft and the eight cannon-type disruptors replacing the engine-mounted weapons, improvements over this design. Having the Klolode with the same loadout would render those improvements pointless.

If you want to get picky, Klingon ships are first shown firing torpedoes in TAS, not TMP, from the hole in the bow which was intended to be the ship's main sensor/deflector.

Projecting forward from ENT is a pointless exercise as it was far too closely tied to the 24th design aesthetic including little which might have been a plausible precursor to the vessels we saw in the 23rd century. The half-moon Dominion-style warp engines on the Raptor are a prime example. There's one big stylistic loop from TMP>TNG>ENT which skips right over the series look.

As for this CGI model, as I mentioned in another thread, it's too bad the effects team didn't match the colors of the original filming model or even use the color scheme from the one MJ kept with the aqua not only on the belly but the boom as well. Am I wrong or is the front of the engineering hull not the same shape as the original? Is that a result of the low-poly model?

 

[FalTorPan]

I dislike this model. The portholes are too big. The impulse engine ports are just slapped on and don't feel like they belong where they are, and the texturing is generic.

The worst thing: this model looks REALLY low-poly...where there should be curves I can see straight lines (look under the central impulse vents in the aft shot). It honestly looks like a low-poly videogame model.

The weapons effect feels like another plugin. You don't need to add all this particle and cloud nonsense to energy weapons effects. Notice that the Star Wars prequel films still keep their blaster beams as simple hot lines...and no one complained that those looked old fashioned.

For a ship that appears in several episodes this one got a poor treatment.

That model has fewer polygons than the original Lara Croft.

 

[Maurice]

The Klingon ship looked fine to me, not too great but not bad either. But I agree that any final judgment should be based on the HD version. I am hoping that they will sell the series to HDNet or Sci-Fi next year, so we can see it in HD.

I hate to disagree, but if anything, the flaws of the model should be less apparent on standard def. The fact that I can see (in motion) the flats of the polygons on an old NTSC display indicates that these are going to be doubly apparent in HD.

 

[Cyrus]

I hate to disagree, but if anything, the flaws of the model should be less apparent on standard def. The fact that I can see (in motion) the flats of the polygons on an old NTSC display indicates that these are going to be doubly apparent in HD.

I didn't claim they would look better on HD, just that any final judgment should be based on that since they are being created for HD. Yes, any flaws will be more apparent but the good parts will be enhanced too. I have yet to see TOS-R in HD but my guess is the model will probably look better to me in HD, with me being just a trek geek and not a cgi/vfx geek I usually don't notice the flaws mentioned here or elsewhere by cgi experts.

 

[ticktock]

This is something I would have ditched. The whole disruptor/plasma-looking bolts-from-the-nacelles thingy. It didn't look good in the original 1968 opticals and effects and makes less sense now that we know that D7 battle cruisers DON'T have disruptor banks and emitters on or above their warp nacelles. They should have had the cruiser fire orange or red torpedoes from its forward launch tube a'la TMP or STAR TREK VI. Something that fits in with established Klingon weapon usage and the blueprints and designs of this ship.

I love the Remastering team and their work most of the time...but they ARE too damn slavish to the original effects they're replacing, even if they looked stupid and illogical. They should be more original and stretch themselves. Not robotically recreate so many original opticals to the letter.

those shots were awful...

green goo from ghostbusters?

or is it flubber blubber...?

what were they thinking?


a simple green pulsed beam/photons etc would have been fine instead of that green potty.

or is it green piss?

green gunge?


any other similar descriptions?

green phglem from nostrils.

 

[The Squire of Gothos]

On the basis of the screen caps, nay!

It looks too much like its made of plastic and the finer detailing is lacking around the rear of the ship. That disruptor effect just looks silly too.

 

[Timo]

I say nay on three counts.

Admittedly, the TOS original was seriously lacking in detail and only appeared convincing because it wasn't seen all that much. Something obviously had to be done to it. But I can primarily see three things being done, and this is none of them.

One might have upgraded the TOS design to match the visual appeal of the TOS Enterprise by adding subtle detail and texture (which was severely missing from the original), or by adding lots of gross "made-up" detail in a quest for more realism and/or visual appeal (something that succeeded very well with the Orion ship in "Journey to Babel"). But this model is still way too plasticky to meet the first criterion, and the "made-up" detail isn't convincing or pleasing enough to qualify this as a novel, innovative work of art.

The third choice would have been to tie this together with the various spinoff shows. At times it's difficult to suspend disbelief enough to accept that TOS and TMP took place in the same universe, but the spinoffs have done their darnedest to straddle and close that gap, especially when it comes to detailing the Klingon ships. Any of the takes on Klingon ships in TFS, TNG, DS9 or ENT could have been used or adapted here. What we get doesn't seem to fit that otherwise coherent family of designs, though.

I'm convinced the disruptor bolt looks much better in full motion, tho...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Warped9]

I like that they resisted muddying up the model with all sorts of hull detailing like the post TOS ships. That kind of detail works with the look in TMP onward, but it would have clashed in TOS.

 

[Timo]

Dunno about that. I could have enjoyed seeing a bit more detail on the supposed hangar door á la the TMP ships, for example. And if they were going to do those gadawful impulse engines anyway, why not give them at least as much detail as the corresponding Enterprise fixtures?

(Alternately, they could have given the impulse engines some sort of shutters, like the Enterprise engines seem to have, so that the glowy bits would only be visible when the ship accelerates a lot.)

The Enterprise herself has surprisingly much detail, even if it isn't of greeblie type. A range of painted-on hatches, ports and vents would have made sense on the Klingon ship, too.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Noname Given]

This is something I would have ditched. The whole disruptor/plasma-looking bolts-from-the-nacelles thingy. It didn't look good in the original 1968 opticals and effects and makes less sense now that we know that D7 battle cruisers DON'T have disruptor banks and emitters on or above their warp nacelles. They should have had the cruiser fire orange or red torpedoes from its forward launch tube a'la TMP or STAR TREK VI. Something that fits in with established Klingon weapon usage and the blueprints and designs of this ship.

I love the Remastering team and their work most of the time...but they ARE too damn slavish to the original effects they're replacing, even if they looked stupid and illogical. They should be more original and stretch themselves. Not robotically recreate so many original opticals to the letter.

Klingon D7's don't have disruptors on their warp macelles?

They most certainly DID in the original version (non-remastered); so where the hell does this statement even come from? Personally, I like that th team kept the disruptors firing from WHERE they did in the original; although I wish they had done a better job of animating the 'bolts' themselves; AS the long shot of the bolts coming from the D7 in the original looked MUCH better than what they did. The 1967 SFX team actually did a nice job of animating them in that shot, and I can't believe the mess they turned into under the remastered team.