The special effects...

[**DONOTDELETE**]

What does everyone think of them?
Judging from the advertisements, they look somewhat disappointing. The fire effect on the Valen looks especially fake.
There are a few impressive elements, notably the main ship. But they look too bright, too colorful. The effects from Babylon 5 looked more realistic somehow.
Or is it just me?




[This message has been edited by breen (edited January 18, 2002).]

 

[LightNZ]

That's how things are going - it's an artwork

Though, yes, it would be nice if someone took them back a bit sometimes, and did rugged b5 earthforce stuff but redone

Still, i'm very impressed by them - it's just the style they have chosen

(every show has it's own style of graphics now) - be interesting to give the same ship to different shows and see what they looked like

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[**DONOTDELETE**]

the company doing these efects (name?) have never done a show with this level or number of special effect shots before if i remember correctly, so they may not be sure just what looks good...

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I envy you having me to envy...

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[**DONOTDELETE**]

I disagree about the explosions -

http://www.scifi.com/b5rangers/gallery/images/img/image07.jpg

Oh and for Joe who disagreed with me about bluestars being around IIRC -

http://www.scifi.com/b5rangers/gallery/images/img/image02.jpg

Just what are those blue, star like shapes?

Anyway, being serious for a moment. I haven't seen it obviously and won't for a long time, but I expect the bright colours are due to perspective. In Babylon 5 and Crusade we were of the perspective of humans, in this we're coming from Minbari perspectives... who are quite 'colourful'.

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Marc Cosgrove

"From chaos, order came. As was inevitable." -Summoning light

[This message has been edited by Dark Lord (edited January 18, 2002).]

[This message has been edited by Dark Lord (edited January 18, 2002).]

 

[Arrghman]

GVFX also does the effects for Stargate SG-1, and those are rather good IMHO

its hard to tell just from the previews about the quality of the effects... personally i consider the effects from season 3 of b5 (when FI reached their height during the b5 run) to be some of the best for the show in general, and when NetterDigital took over i think it went downhill from there.. many of the effects in Crusade were really *really* icky in my opinion, especially from people who work with CG (im only a CG hobbyist right now, but it still counts

). a lot of it has to do with the motion of the ships/objects and the camera movement, in Crusade most of the ships movements were *very* unrealistic, especially compared to the first 3 seasons of B5. and since season 4 when NetterDigital took over the effects of b5, the camera movements have been consistantly not very good... i think they tried to simulate the movements of a real camera, but they didnt pay enough attention to the 'randomness' that would incur, so everything looked a little off... again, this is all my opinion, so. also, we havent really seen any of the ships up close (well we have, but they've always been moving pretty fast), and given GVFX's modeling work in SG1 i'm fairly confident that it'll be up to par

but i think the point im trying to make is that you cant judge the effects of a 2 hour production based on a collective 5 minutes of footage from random places in the movie

forgive my longwinded reply please

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[Arrghman]

oh, and the lighting is really important too, thats another thing i didnt like about Netter Digital... they just didnt have Foundation's talent for lighting IMHO

all of these things contribute to good effects, and you need to see a wide variety of footage to make a judgement

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[**DONOTDELETE**]

I just saw "A Call to Arms" again last night. I was surprised at how realistic the effects in that movie were. The Excalibur looked so much better than it did in "Crusade".


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[Lyta]

*runs and hides from this thread*

Geez DL, did you have to paste in the actual images instead of posting links to them? Yuk, the dreaded horizontal scroll ...

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[Arrghman]

one thing that *really* got me about crusade were the orange jumppoints... sometimes they used the same one as in ACTA and sometimes they used a 'new' one, which looked like a bright nasty sploch... yuck

but to their credit, there were a few crusade shots that were pretty good... but that was outweighed by the 'bad' ones IMHO...

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[**DONOTDELETE**]

Double posts, how you mock me.

[This message has been edited by Dark Lord (edited January 18, 2002).]

 

[**DONOTDELETE**]

Just want to point out that in Crusade it was MUCH more realistic due to the active role JPL took. They just happen to know their stuff when it concerns space.

People dislike the effects I think because it was so real, and real life tends to be boring (in context of imagination).

They used real nebulae, star maps, galactic plane, inertia (more effectively) etc.

Oh and that planet map in the picture I posted needs a lot of work IMO.

Looks like something photoshop would come up with in 5 minutes with an automatic program. But I can forgive them since this is the biggest project they've ever dealt with apparently.

Lyta - Editing now, sorry.

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Marc Cosgrove

"From chaos, order came. As was inevitable." -Summoning light

 

[**DONOTDELETE**]

The updated jumpgates look cool. Though they look a little too different from what we have seen before.

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[Arrghman]

i wouldnt agree about JPL's involvment... it did help the realism of the backgrounds, yeah, but the motions werent that realistic at all, especially of the smaller craft... FI did a *much* better job with intertia, especially with the starfuries, in the first few B5 seasons

i dunno, for me the camera movements really throw me off. they insist on constantly zooming into things like a real camera would do, but its always so mechanical that i find it very distracting. and i'm not even going to mention the almost motion-sickness inducing movements that happened every time the excalibur fired its main gun, you know where they run the camera down the lenght of the excalibur? the virtual camera was moving at a rate of a mile a second and twisting all around... impossible to focus on anything

but i guess lots of this can fall under the catagory of personal asthetics...

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[AntonyF]

Compared to B5, these effects are WAY better. I think the use of the Cantrell weapons scenes will be love or hate. I love them, but many others don't. However when you look at, say, the icy metiorite scenes when you get to them, there'll be no doubt in your mind that these effects are superb.


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[Kribu]

From what I've seen in the trailers and previews, I don't think I'll hate the weapons scenes.

As for the rest of the effects... It's of course really difficult to get a good idea about the quality, when all you have seen are tiny little videos on the computer screen, of not the best quality.

As long as they don't look completely horrible (as I'm sure they won't), I don't really care... I'm very good at not noticing any flaws that CGI experts would probably see at once.

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Kribu's Lounge | kribu@ranger.b5lr.com

 

[channe]

When effects work for me, they are seamlessly integrated into the show. Not always visually, but storywise. They don't glare. They fit.

I can't wait to see the weapons pod scenes. Something like that gets the audience far more integrated into the story than just someone firing a button - and it's a helluva lot more dramatic.

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[drakh]

Arrghman, as I've said here before, I generally feel the same way about Netter Digital. The framing and angles of the CGI shots in the Rangers trailers look much more interesting.

As for Crusade, you should try watching the show in production order. There is a massive decrease in FX/CGI quality starting an episode or two after TNT got involved.

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[BlackStar]

From what I've seen of these new effects, they look good.

Most notably Tuzennor--I love the way they've redone the look. Or, uh, moved to the other side of the city--you know, where the buildings were done by a different architect?

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[bakana]

FWIW, the FX in B5 were forced to change when they could no longer buy new Amiga/Video Toasters. They had to go with the Windoze version which just isn't as good.

I'm not sure What they are using now, but it probably still hasn't quite caught up.

As far as the JPL involvement, there was always a connection.
It just became Official during Crusade.

All the way back to "The Gathering" the FX were done so as to be as faithful to the Laws of Physics as TV permits.
They used NASA photos as a reference for All the outside shots.
People who don't understand used to complain that the outside shots were "too crisp" and didn't have the same Look as the interiors.

Some of them understood when the effects of Vacuum and a lack of surround surface on light scatter was explained.

Others continued to bitch. They wanted Fuzzy outer space.



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Do not ascribe your own motivations to others:
At best, it will break your heart.
At worst, it will get you dead."

 

[Arrghman]

im not quite sure what you mean about not being able to buy VTs... as i understand it, the effects in the Gathering were done by Foundation Imaging using Lightwave which was at that time simply a VT component, when Lightwave moved over its own application they used that for the CG (VT for compositing and such)... Lightwave is crossplatform and works exactly the same in windows as it does on the amiga.

for all of B5 and Crusade Lightwave was primarially used for the CG effects... GVFX is using Maya mostly, but i hear some b5lr shots were done in LW as there wasnt time to fully convert all the old LW models over to Maya.

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