...I hope we see more of its class in the seasons to come, since it was blown up.
Visual Effects in Discovery
- Thread starter Galaxy
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...I hope we see more of its class in the seasons to come, since it was blown up.
For the TOS esthetic how much surface texturig is needed?
That is a good point, they do a lot more vfx scenes. Things like the floating 3d maps, I really like, others like the Mushroom forest look a tad cheap to me. Interestingly, the forest has the same blueish/purpleish look as everything else.
The amount of ships to me is not what makes or breaks a scene. Discovery at it's best, imo, was the one on on of Discovery vs, the Ship of the Dead.
The background I agree with, especially the binary stars background.
At least on Netflix Discovery is shown in HDR, and Dolby Vision. I think this may be the only show where HDR is combined with 1080p.
I actually prefer dark space, since as mentioned it is realistic, and as has been pointed out previous Trek, especially TNG,DS9, and VOY overlit the ships. However in that case one can have the ships light themselves up. The only Trek which really got this right imo, was Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Absolutely beautiful model work with the spot lights lighting up the ship, 10/10. Ironically Discovery has plenty of spot lights on it's hull, they just do not seem to have much output. Perhaps lighting is one area where physical models still have an advantage.
I will say, one starship shot I thought Discovery NAILED was this close up of the Gagarin. It looks very real and natural.
I agree nicely shot, plus the design of the ship works for me as well.
That ship just works, right side up or up-side down
Yes.
It's become too much of an online cliche to say that "the effects in thus-and-such look like videogame cutscenes."
The CG effects in Discovery were better than that, but not much. The space stuff especially was far short of anything photorealistic or even, in most cases, particularly convincing. As is often the case with rushed, under-designed stuff the action was often murky and difficult to follow, and point-of-view was all over the place.
The CG effects in Discovery were better than that, but not much. The space stuff especially was far short of anything photorealistic or even, in most cases, particularly convincing. As is often the case with rushed, under-designed stuff the action was often murky and difficult to follow, and point-of-view was all over the place.
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No because I get that and all my other 90's Trek itches scratched by The Orville.
It's funny, I was watching "In a Mirror, Darkly" to catch my friends up on the Defiant stuff, and I didn't think I'd fully realized that Discovery doesn't use stock shots the same way any of the prior shows did. It looks like nearly every exterior shot is specifically made, which is really interesting. I suppose part of it is that they don't cut outside for the sake of cutting outside as much as earlier shows did.
According to the Devs over at Star Trek Online, there are Several models of the Discovery used for different kinds of shots, close ups, far away, certain angles.
They were given all the show used CG models to make their in game versions, which is how they know.
Which I assume is industry standard, you wouldn't have the most detailed version used in shots where wouldn't be able to see that kind of detail.
They were given all the show used CG models to make their in game versions, which is how they know.
Which I assume is industry standard, you wouldn't have the most detailed version used in shots where wouldn't be able to see that kind of detail.
Yep. There are even situations where too much detail that's too small to see introduces noise and other problems in the image, beyond the extra time and memory requirements. You can see examples of how this was done to some background ships from Battlestar Galactica on this page.
What is the actual problem: too many poly's, not enough on certain surfaces? too much/too poor surface detail? Some rendering variables set incorrectly?
Yep, LOD or Level Of Detail in industry parlance.
Oh, it can be all sorts of stuff that can make a model too detailed for a scene. Grids or ribs can create moiré patterns. Textures that provide a subtle level of detail close-up can fade into monotony. CG software sometimes has trouble with margins of error for polygons, so surfaces that are near each other might interpenetrate in ways they aren't supposed to from a large distance, so, say, hull markings might flicker, or rooms behind windows might have the edges of their walls and floors stick out slightly from the exterior.
And then there's just the issue that every polygon and light adds to rendering time and computing overhead, so if you're at a distance where you won't see the difference, it can save a lot of time to replace, say, spotlights with glow maps, or complex interior lighting effects in engines or behind windows with simple image maps. Especially since if you're seeing a ship from a distance, the reason is probably because you're either seeing something else in the foreground that'll be fully detailed, or there are a ton of ships in the shot, so having the full-quality version of all of them will slow things down for no benefit (no one is going to be seeing the rooms behind the windows of Discovery when it's only a hundred pixels long in a shot).
The azteching textures on the Discovery and other Federation ships is a bit oversaturated. They need to dial to contrast on them just a bit.
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