The pennant and stripes are raised and painted. So more like a badge than a decal
Or an embossing.
USS Enterprise (eventually) on Discovery?
- Thread starter EJD1984
- Start date
Or an embossing.
Yeah, that was evident even last season. I'm not crazy about it.
Look at the highlight on the screen-left edge of the deflector dish, the way it jiggles around. Also the windows(?) on sides of the drydock arms flicker, as well. There are bright spots in those areas, but since they're smaller than a pixel and brighter than pure white, the renderer doesn't always "catch" them when it calculates what's within a given pixel. I don't know a lot about technical rendering theory, but my understanding of how anti-aliasing work is that rather than just calculating what's visible in the center of a single pixel once, anti-aliasing algorithms calculate different areas within a pixel and then average them together to get a softer, more realistic boundary between contrasting areas rather than hard stops along the pixel-grid (or "aliasing"). Since the highlights (or lights) are so much brighter compares to the areas next to them, every frame is getting different results when it looks in that area depending on exactly where the bright spot and the dark spots are, and its apparent in those spots because its so small, and so bright (and the post-effects adding halos and glows around bright light sources amplify the effect), while most of the frame either has less contrast between bright and dark on the sub-pixel scale, or the super-bright areas are much large than a pixel (like the engines on the worker bees, the honeycomb lights, or the highlight on the nacelle dome), so the bulk of the scene didn't need as much anti-aliasing as those areas we called out, and if they were pressed for time, they could've used less antialiasing and gotten the render back faster and it'd look fine for 95% of the shot.
Without knowing exactly how much time they needed to save, I can't say precisely what techniques I might've used to correct the issue while still saving time compared to just rendering the scene at a higher quality setting. I think the drydock windows are a write-off, they're spread out over too much of the frame for any of my normal tricks to work, but the highlights on the deflector are so such that I might've been able to render a "patch" that was just the deflector dish and nothing else in the frame at higher quality, and composite that over the main scene. There are also some fun machine-learning noise-reduction tools in modern compositors that might be able to reduce the amount of jitter visible frame-by-frame, especially if the scene was broken out into different layers so the window glows and deflector highlights were isolated, but if they didn't have time to render longer, they probably also didn't have time to hand-massage the shot in the composite.
Or there was just a disconnect between the FX team and the set design team/writers.
The script probably said something like 'Front of saucer', but not exactly where in the front of the saucer for the FX team.
They called it a conference room in dialogue in part 2. And you can see 3 round windows in the scenes (the middle one is behind the torpedo in most shots, but you can see the edges)
Last edited:
It's an entire raised metal construction of it's own, yeah.
Oh, ok. I hadn't noticed that, and I thought he meant the still image, not the video. Now that you mention it, that is very sloppy.
That's how I understand it as well. I'm a computer programmer but I don't do 3D stuff.
I liked to play the "What was the last shot out the door" game with VFX-heavy episodes of nuBSG, back in the day. Of course, there'd always be some mistakes now and again (one time, using a preview-quality version of a stock shot they'd had for years, or being able to see parts of the models that were deleted because they were going to be out of frame sneaking in at the edges), but sometimes there'd be just one new shot that had no shadows, or no smoke effects, or no motion blur, and you could just tell someone had been looking at the progress bar the night before final cut, looking at the clock, cussing, unchecking options, and then hitting "render" again.
If you watch the departure scene in Star Trek (2009) when the Enterprise slides away from the space port, you can see that a panel of the ship's Shuttlebay is missing from the render. A rather silly mistake.
Pffft. Discovery lost their whole shuttlebay door
But on the other hand at least it's the same. So I'm willing to ignore the engraved or embossed nature of the pennant.
So is it me or do the shots of the ships from Part 1 look substantially less finished than those for Part 2? Despite working in visual design, I'm not versed in CGI, but the lighting and rendering of the ships in Part 1 looks much more rushed and video-game-ish than pretty much anything else this season (which on the whole has been quite good compared to Season 1, I thought). Maybe a casualty of the move from one to two episodes for the finale?
Ooh, I'd love to know where in the show those were!
Ooh, I'd love to know where in the show those were!
I had a Jadzia Dax action figure when I was a kid. She had a removable uniform.
You can see missing model pieces in “Water,” in one of the shots of the water tanks leaking, as well as “Pegasus,” in the closing shot of the Pegasus Vipers launching (in both cases, the arms connecting the flight pods to the main body we’re removed).
The preview-quality stock shot is, IIRC, in “Litmus,” and is the shot of Galactica looking straight down at the nose. It’s one of my favorites, and apparently someone else’s, since it’s the only stock shot they recreated after the ship was heavily weathered in season 3 and they had to make all-new stock footage.
The “last shots” that always stuck out for me was Galactica’s first jump in the miniseries, where the flight-pods are extended, shadows are turned off, and the whole shot has a weird post-effect motion blur. A “final” version of the shot was used in the season two premiere. The other one was the big Pegasus intro shot in “Exodus, Part II,” where the shells are missing their usual flame and smoke effects, so they’re just yellow blobs popping out of the cannons.
I miss college. I really sympathize with what Ron Moore said about how he always used throwaway references to TOS but not as many from the later shows, because that’s when he had the time to watch episodes over and over and all the details stuck much more than the episodes he was writing. At this point, I’m not even sure if there are CG spaceships in DSC or The Expanse.
The big one that always jumps out at me is the Cylons marching on New Caprica at the end of "Lay Down Your Burdens." And it's not even an issue with the CG but with the compositing – the CG Cylons are tinted way too blue to match the background plates. Like it's not even close, they look like they were cut out of footage from a completely different environment and pasted over the location footage. I can only imagine that they barely had time to slap the CG in there, do some basic defocus and grain, and ship it off.
Thanks, now I need to rewatch the show again. (Great stuff! I love this kind of thing.)
Yep, I always wanted to reach into an editing bay and change the white balance on that shot.
That's my guess. They had to put most of their time and resources into the absolutely insane scope of the space battle in Part 2. The most photoreal starship shot this season in my opinion is the first shot of the Enterprise in drydock at the very end of the finale. Not he wide shot, but the opening one with the worker bee.
I like that the drydock the Enterprise is in looks a lot like the Warp Five Complex orbital drydock that the NX-01 was constructed in more than a century before. It's not the same facility to be sure but it's nice that the DSC production designers are looking at ENT for some of their visual cues, such as the Enterprise's blue glowing inner chiller bars on her warp nacelles.
I know that the original TOS production team wanted the nacelles to glow back in the late 1960s but didn't have the budget to pull off the effect but it's great that DSC is taking the Enterprise NX-01 look to flesh out the new series' take on the TOS Enterprise. She looks pretty good and sleek for being in a fleet with so many sore thumbs. The original Matt Jefferies design is still the best around.
I know that the original TOS production team wanted the nacelles to glow back in the late 1960s but didn't have the budget to pull off the effect but it's great that DSC is taking the Enterprise NX-01 look to flesh out the new series' take on the TOS Enterprise. She looks pretty good and sleek for being in a fleet with so many sore thumbs. The original Matt Jefferies design is still the best around.
Last edited:
Still (and this isn't an uncommon problem on Trek, but DSC has been one of the worst offenders), I wish they'd fiddled with the light rig for the model. The warp drive, impulse engines, and running lights were all on while the ship was in dock. It feels more real when the ships react to context (for instance, I love that the nacelles on the TMP and JJ-verse ships only switch on when they're actually going to warp speed, same with the impulse engines being dimmer when the ship is "idling"). On DSC, everything is switched on, all the time.
Yeah I love the reflection on the bridge dome on that one.
Very minor quibble with the otherwise gorgeous dock shots: why make those (light?) panels the same blue/white as so much of the UI (and Discovery's nacelles, etc)?
I know they are similarly colored in TMP, but there's a much warmer (or at least more neutral) tone there whereas here the blue is coloring/cooling the whole image.
Some nice off-white would really give a clean "realism" to the shots, which it seemed they've been doing much more of this season with exteriors as compared to S1. Again, super minor quibble.
I know they are similarly colored in TMP, but there's a much warmer (or at least more neutral) tone there whereas here the blue is coloring/cooling the whole image.
Some nice off-white would really give a clean "realism" to the shots, which it seemed they've been doing much more of this season with exteriors as compared to S1. Again, super minor quibble.
Last edited:
Similar threads
