Yeah, I'll agree the edges of some of the recent ships were pretty sketchy...but I tried to ignore the miniscule visual snafus and enjoy the overall effects for what they were. A couple of times I rolled my eyes a little.
The D7 Klingon Battle Cruiser in "Elaan" Remastered...Yea? Or Nay?
- Thread starter cooleddie74
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Apologies. Not reading close enough, I gather.
By "got it wrong" I'm simply noting that if there's a conflict between TOS and later works, TOS set the precedent. Just because something was there later doesn't mean it should be in TOS. (See Core, Warp.)
Lieut. Arex, I think you are judging way too much from a few fuzzy pics. I don't know CGI work as well as you, I'm sure, but the D7 looked pretty good today in The Enterprise Incident. I think some of what you are seeing as visible polys are deliberate plating they are trying to show. At least it did to me, watching TV this afternoon.
darkwing_duck1
Vice Admiral
No doubt I've been harsh.
I'm not terribly knowledgeable about CGI, just having played around with it a bit making a few models for SFC. The few images we have are enough to judge the mesh. These are relatively low-poly, done that way so they can be built and rendered quickly no doubt. For long distance shots, that's fine. But up close... not so much. If you look at this image you can see the flat shapes faceting the bottom of what should be a smoothly curved hull. That's what I'm talking about, not the subtle panel variations they've worked into the hull texture maps. They can get away with that on a standard resolution TV in a moving shot, but for the intended release in HD, I'd bet these will look pretty lousy.
Without re-igniting the whole disrupters from the nacelles debate, I found it interesting in The Enterprise Incident, CBS Digital has it both ways. At the end of the episode, after Scotty has gotten the cloaking device working and the Enterprise has come about, the Romulan D7 goes flying off, away from the Enterprise. As it does, we red objects being fired from ball in the front of the D7 and, later, green streaks being fired from the nacelles. Since no weapons fire was ever shown on screen in the original episode at this point, I don't have any problem with this. CBS Digital can interpret all they want.
I did like that. A plasma torpedo would have been really nice, but using the disruptors along with the photon torpedoes the Romulans and Klingons used in TAS was a welcome touch of continuity.
Yep, I saw 'em.
I agree. Any past problems aside, showing BOTH frontal torpedoes and disruptors firing from the wingpoints was a nice compromise.
Just curious, did anyone spot if the Remastering team put the tri-cornered Klingon Empire symbol on the hull of the cruiser? Even the old B&W Jeffries blueprints from forty years ago had the Imperial symbol on the hull. Did the 2008 team do so? This photo never shows it because of angle and distance, but I dig it so...there.
Er ... yeah. Light doesn't work substantially differently in space from on the surface of the Earth. Refraction has to do with why the sky looks blue, not why most things have colors.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngTcUe1K7BI offers a splendid example of this, the discovery of orange soil on the lunar surface during Apollo 17. http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/mirrors/images/images/pao/AS17/10075961.jpg shows a close-up (which, I admit, isn't that impressive-looking) of the soil, along with the color gnomon intended to allow people at home to calibrate for the difference between how something looks on film and what it would look like under normal lighting conditions.
At last, someone who understands what it takes to make an episode! The name of the game is still $$$$... income versus outlay... considering the budget I think they have done pretty well.
Yes, I'm pretty sure it showed up in one shot. An "over the shoulder" shot, looking at the ship from it's 7 o'clock position, if I recall correctly. It seemed to be where it should have been, looking what it should have looked like.
As said, if there's an object there, it will do pretty much the same thing to light whether it sits in vacuum or air. And if there's nothing there, of course it won't be colored anything, either.
However, one might argue that space is inherently very dark, unless you are close to a star or a shiny object. That would have two consequences: in darkness, your eye would revert to the very light-sensitive set of "rod" cells that cannot see color (or, in other words, can only see one color), so the dark objects wouldn't glow in multiple colors any more than they do in a dark night here on Earth.
And when a shiny object such as a white-painted starship entered your field of vision, your eyes would be so overwhelmed by the brightness that the colors of the dark background (say, nice red nebulae) would fade out in comparison. It would be extremely difficult for the human eye to see both a bright starship and a dim colorful nebula at the same time. You see some of this effect in NASA shots where the bright white space stations and spacecraft call for short exposure times in photography, meaning that you usually can't see the dim background stars and you virtually never see the colors of the stars, not the same way you can see them if you slowly adapt your eyes to the starlight on a dark night.
In that respect, we probably have to treat all Star Trek space visuals as "computer-enhanced for the benefit of the audience" rather than "as seen by the naked eye"...
Timo Saloniemi
Just looked at the FX reel and just noticed something.
It look like the ship has 2 "waist" mounted phasers (or whatever) on each side of the the rear hull.
AKA SFB D7
It look like the ship has 2 "waist" mounted phasers (or whatever) on each side of the the rear hull.
AKA SFB D7
While this is true, nearly all photographs of astronomical phenomena also fall into this category in one way or another.
You don't have to be knowledgeable about CGI to critique it. I'm not a proctologist but I know buffalo chips when I see 'em.
Even the subpar new Remastered CGI is head and shoulders over many early TNG and DS9 opticals. I have issues with some of the choices made lately, but overall they're more than serviceable considering how many hardcore fans never wanted the changes in the first place in addition to how poorly CBS/Paramount treated the franchise between, say, 2004 and 2006.
