There's your answer, it was an one-off. It would be pretty expensive to do that for 15 episodes.
Visual Effects in Discovery
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There's your answer, it was an one-off. It would be pretty expensive to do that for 15 episodes.
Is anyone at CBS is discerning enough to get a new VFX house for season 2?
I've been very happy with the VFX up until this last episode. I'm not a FX guy, i know very little about it so I can't quite put my finger on it but it just didn't look good in too many noticeable places.
I wanna say the contrast was so weird like it was being used to cover for, i dunno, cheapiness?
I wanna say the contrast was so weird like it was being used to cover for, i dunno, cheapiness?
It will always come down to price. They want Buck Rogers, but they want it for the fewest bucks possible.
^I don't think it's the company's fault. The problems seem like a creative issue further up the chain. If they switch to Zoic or D-Neg or reconstitute an in-house team or pull Foundation Imaging though time from the '90s or whatever, it won't fix it if the producers are still demanding all highlights, no diffuse, more blue nebulas, more bloomy bullshit, more asteroids, more contrast, more, more, more.
I'm sorry, but you've made a terrible mistake here. Not in what you said, which merely a regular mistake, but in posting it in a thread I'm participating in. You see, I am fucking obsessive about window boxes on CG models. Like, I've got the passion of the converted about a lot of things. Linear color. HDR compositing. Depth of field effects using shaped blurs and not gaussian blurs.* Physically accurate lens flares. Chromic aberration (a teeny bit of it). But I love window boxes.
So, now, more detail than you require.
The Discovery model has window boxes for, as near as I can tell, all the rabbit-tooth windows (probably because the rabbit-tooth window rooms have matching sets), plus window boxes for several of the big rectangle windows (that seems to vary a bit, a quick survey suggests they've been adding more throughout the season, but it's not great that they had such a tight close-up in "Context" before they'd fully detailed out the model). Might even have low-detail interiors, it's a little hard to tell from the outside. The Shenzhou has no window boxes aside from the bridge, the Captain's quarters, and possibly the Ready Room.
The NX-01 had no window boxes. It did use a fractal noise texture to break them up, which led to a memorable thread here where someone was convinced (or trolling) that Paramount had put a man's speedo-clad pelvis into the windows of the ship based on a particular V-shaped splotch in a publicity shot. Discovery may be controversial, but I fear the discourse here will never be as insane as it was then.
The physical models of the E-E, Voyager, and, IIRC, Enterprise-Refit had photos of the sets printed on slide film behind the windows. The Voyager 3D model replicated the effect, which I thought was terribly unconvincing in that case (it's weird how many rooms on that ship with windows were corridors, or sickbay on a downhill slope). The digital E-E models all had plain glowing windows.
All of the ships in the Kelvin movies have window boxes, at least the ones you see close enough to tell. Sometimes people are walking around in them. Production value!
None of the Enterprise-D models had window boxes, but they get an honorable mention for the hand-animated scene of someone walking out of the conference room composited in to the last shot of the opening credits.
*There's at least one shot of the midseason finale where they're clearly using gaussian blurs and not a proper lens blur on the out-of-focus Discovery seen through the window of the Sarcophagus ship and it chaps my ass because they do it properly in so many other shots.
I'm sorry, but you've made a terrible mistake here. Not in what you said, which merely a regular mistake, but in posting it in a thread I'm participating in. You see, I am fucking obsessive about window boxes on CG models. Like, I've got the passion of the converted about a lot of things. Linear color. HDR compositing. Depth of field effects using shaped blurs and not gaussian blurs.* Physically accurate lens flares. Chromic aberration (a teeny bit of it). But I love window boxes.
So, now, more detail than you require.
The Discovery model has window boxes for, as near as I can tell, all the rabbit-tooth windows (probably because the rabbit-tooth window rooms have matching sets), plus window boxes for several of the big rectangle windows (that seems to vary a bit, a quick survey suggests they've been adding more throughout the season, but it's not great that they had such a tight close-up in "Context" before they'd fully detailed out the model). Might even have low-detail interiors, it's a little hard to tell from the outside. The Shenzhou has no window boxes aside from the bridge, the Captain's quarters, and possibly the Ready Room.
The NX-01 had no window boxes. It did use a fractal noise texture to break them up, which led to a memorable thread here where someone was convinced (or trolling) that Paramount had put a man's speedo-clad pelvis into the windows of the ship based on a particular V-shaped splotch in a publicity shot. Discovery may be controversial, but I fear the discourse here will never be as insane as it was then.
The physical models of the E-E, Voyager, and, IIRC, Enterprise-Refit had photos of the sets printed on slide film behind the windows. The Voyager 3D model replicated the effect, which I thought was terribly unconvincing in that case (it's weird how many rooms on that ship with windows were corridors, or sickbay on a downhill slope). The digital E-E models all had plain glowing windows.
All of the ships in the Kelvin movies have window boxes, at least the ones you see close enough to tell. Sometimes people are walking around in them. Production value!
None of the Enterprise-D models had window boxes, but they get an honorable mention for the hand-animated scene of someone walking out of the conference room composited in to the last shot of the opening credits.
*There's at least one shot of the midseason finale where they're clearly using gaussian blurs and not a proper lens blur on the out-of-focus Discovery seen through the window of the Sarcophagus ship and it chaps my ass because they do it properly in so many other shots.
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It makes me wonder how much they actually spent for the 'space' visual effects and how much of the $8 million per episode figure included the cost of attempting (and failing) to set up their own in house effects studio?
I also wonder if the end result will look better on Blu-Ray; as there's still some compression when you're streaming anything digitally over the internet.
You are my kind of VFX nerd, sir.
It's not the VFX house's fault. Pixomondo is capable of fantastic work. The ball is getting dropped either on the creative side, in that someone wants it to look the way it does, or in time and money.
This is the work Pixomondo did on Star Trek Into Darkness, and if Discovery's effects looked this good, I don't think anyone would complain.
Man I would kill for a good DS9 render that actually had decent window boxes.
The Sci-Fi-Show "The Expanse" has probably half the Budget of "Discovery" but looks a lot better when it comes to CGI effects. The ship models in Discovery look and "feel" like they have no real weight somehow.
Here is a really impressive sequence of "The Expanse". "Discovery" should look at least this good...
Here is a really impressive sequence of "The Expanse". "Discovery" should look at least this good...
I agree The Expanse has VFX that "do the job." They are perhaps a bit overlit (considering most of the action takes place in the outer solar system) but otherwise they're pretty realistic, particularly compared to the weird, smeary bloom effects added to Discovery's shots.
I'll alert Swat.
I'm all seriousness, I love someone who knows their subject, and enjoyed your post
Who's fault is it for: all highlights, no diffuse, more blue nebulas, more bloomy bullshit, more asteroids, more contrast? Is it story driven, producers decisionB or higher up?
Honestly? I think a lot of it comes from the CGI-model of the Discovery herself. Which is probably the most hamfisted, hulky design on Trek ever, and the least detailed CGI ship model we had since Insurrection. Just looking at the details of the other ships on DIS (specifically the Shenzhou, but also the klingon ships, the rest of the human fleet, the space whale,...), it is obvious that it's just a bare minimal improvement over that horribly suck-y Comic Con teaser model. I smell big behind-the-scenes drama. A lot of the shows smeary "look" in space scenes is IMO intentionally to make the design work and obscure the rough edges.
Certainly not the companies fault, though.
I appreciate you more accuratly explaining things, but what I said is easily explained by looking at a single image of the ship:
https://scifanatic-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/dsc-113-rev-head.jpg
All the main visible windows have NO window boxes. Simple, white rectangles.
Notable exceptions being the bridge windows, and the narrow ones when they zoom in on shots. But the majority(!) of visible windows, on ALL sips, have NOTHING behind them. Just a plain, glowy texture.
Which makes all the difference. I don't even need detailed 3D-models behind them. Just some variations would be nice! The monotone way it is, it just looks fake. Compared to this shot from the Callister, which, despite the details not being overly detailed either, looks a lot more realistic, simply by virtue of being varied:
Again, a picture says more than 100 words:
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net...th-down/1000?cb=20160106180837&path-prefix=en
I see what you mean. But at least after they switched to HD, there were pictures of the sets behind the windows, at least for close-up shots.
But even before that: They correctly assumed not all windows should look monotone, and added variations to the, Which makes them look much more realistic than the copy-pasted window lines on the Discovery or the Shenzhou.
Which is a nice low-tec solution to a problem, that works massively better than the much-higher budgeted current iteration.
Which was in 2003, and exactly the last time you could get away with something like that.
And even THEN the vfx-guys bothered with the windows having different levels of brightness-ness and being more distinguishable!:
Yeah! How you could look into the windows in the Kelvin movies was friggin' amazing. I don't expect that from a television show. But some low-tec solution - like all previous iterations - and even parodies make use of - would have been appropriate, to say the least...
Which is only visible in the HD-remaster. For the original tv-resolution (and the technology at the time) this was wholly appropriate. But that was thirty! years! ago. People expect more now. The new vfx-guys need to get their shit together.
Can you explain the difference, preferably with an example? Honest question, I don't know the technical terms.
Well, no. .It's the other way round: You add that detail to your most complex cgi-model once, after that you can use it everytime.
Ironically, I think the vfx work on Into Darkness was partially sub-par compared to ST09 - especially those two sequences, the Federation ambush, and the Kronos chase scene. I don't know why exactly, probably the camera movement. But it all looks very fake. The textures look a lot like plastic, and don't really mix with the location-shots really well. Also, there's a crap-ton of really unconvincing CGI-fog to hide the details during the ambush scene. Very detailed models, though.
I guess that's also more on the directing, than on the company itself...
Indeed! These models have very obviously much lower-res textures, and the lighting is pretty basic. But it looks good! Mostly, becuase the movement of the objects and the camera interact well, and every shot has a clear composition and the spatial relations between the objects are easily identifiable.
Nothing beats IMO the space scenes of the BSG-reboot though. That was some amazing shit! Just perfect directing choices, very moody, consistent, nuanced and realistic.
Yeah, given the right resources Gary Hutzel was an absolut master of his craft as seen in DS9 and BSG. Such a loss.
From reading rumors on the internet The Expanse budget is anywhere between 5-10mil, so basically in the ballpark of STD if not even more so.
What's the source on that? I had a (not in away deep) look but could only find an ambiguous allusion to cost on vox - https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www....4/science-fiction-television-the-expanse-syfy
How much per episode is the VFX budget? Now how much for ...Darkness?
Is there a problem with the shape of DSC that makes it hard to texture and render well? I have not tried to model it,nor render someone else's model.
Is there a problem with the shape of DSC that makes it hard to texture and render well? I have not tried to model it,nor render someone else's model.
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