"Whatever it is, contact in twelve seconds." This is the conversion of my TOS Enterprise to the second pilot version. I got to do this for a scene that got added at the last second to Star Trek: Of Gods and Men. In the movie one of our other FX geniuses did the barrier effects. So as I pursue a good galactic barrier effect in Blender for the S.S. Valiant to play with I thought I'd give this a whirl. Plus it's a nice excuse to show off my WNMHGB Enterprise in higher res. (I think I was more excited to do those two shots than anything else in the film. It was really an honor.)
I like the blur effect that's over most of the ship. However, there needs to be more of that effect applied to the bottom of the Secondary Hull. The edge of that hull is too well defined up against the energy barrier that's in the foreground.
Darn, can't edit my original post. Annoying. Anyway, updated. Revised with a new and improved barrier. This one animates better and I kind of screwed up the colors on the first one (went from memory and then tried to correct in post). Also changed way the alpha channel is used, so that hopefully fixes msbae's complaint. It's still sharper, just because that part of the ship is farther and therefore doesn't have as much motion blur.
This looks great! I love seeing what this could have looked like had TOS-R not gone over board on their changes.
It looks great. I much prefer the "old" barrier FX. One thing missing: the lighting on the Enteprise looks too thorough. Illumination should be biased (and colored) from the barrier ahead, not from behind. One question: I know the WNMHGB aft nacelle caps are supposed to be in place of the very differently shaped ones we saw in the rest of TOS, but what if these spheres were actually still inside, underneath the "cheese graters", as if the grating was a special cover to protect these spheres until the refit allowed them to be exposed? How much longer would the nacelles be if the "grating" were in addition to the "full" sphereoid-tipped nacelles?
Who says the nacelles would have to be longer? Maybe the interior components would just be shorter, pulling the globes back (forward) into the existing nacelle housing.
As I recall, aridas sofia made a great argument that the addition of the rear spheres might be designed to help sort of reconfigure space behind the ship as it traveled. Their addition would be similar to the addition of rear spoilers on some car models to keep a vacuum from forming behind the car and reducing gas mileage. Or the winglets that all aircraft have these days. So they might not have been a requirement, but after years of operation someone realized that they were a good idea. I've found that idea to have a nice logical ring to it.
I'll agree with that, but I also suggest that the gadget itself might be different. You have that little nurnie on the back of the Cage Enterprise, the vents on the WNMHGB E, and the spheres on the back of the production model. All might do the same thing (restore space/time) to varying degrees of efficiency. Well, I was going for something closer to the original studio lighting. While I'll agree that there probably would not be that much light that far out of the galaxy, I'll also argue that there might not be as much light from the barrier itself. I tend to think that a lot of "practical" light in CG can be overdone (e.g. you always see the TOS nacelles lighting up the hull when they didn't do that on the original model even though they WERE practical lights). I was really unhappy with TOS-R's take on the lighting in this episode (and overall I think TOS-R has done some really cool stuff - I'm not a hater). But in this case I didn't think it was either literal or artistic enough. Time to do my own, I guess. (Gotta finish the Valiant first...)