The Starship Captain

What makes a good starship captain?  What drives him to get the ship and crew safely back home dangerous mission after dangerous mission?  Integrity to principle?  A daunting command presence?  A quick and brilliant mind?

None of those things compare to the drive a man has when he has a wife and kid waiting for him back home.

The picture of the whale uses a model I got from a cool guy named P33P on BlenderArtists.org.  I promised him I'd put "Wubby" in a work of mine. :)

Dan

Adamant Cruiser Command Deck WIP

The Misanthropic Retreat

Misanthropic: (adj.)

1. Of, or relating to a misanthrope
2. Marked by a hatred or contempt for humankind 

Retreat: (v.)

1. (a) The act or process of withdrawing, especially from what is dangerous, difficult, or disagreeable; (b) The process of receding from a position or state attained
2. A place of privacy or safety: REFUGE

A good old classic space scene with a spaceship, the Misanthropic Retreat, Lethgoshis's private spacecraft from Plagarus.  A spaceship is a great way to get away from it all, isn't it?

Dan

Plagarus Animation Blues

Character animation remains the singularly hardest aspect of this movie I've run into.  I think the problem stems from the fact that we see real life people moving all the time, so when a CG character starts doing it on screen, any irregularities immediately start popping up all over the place.

Take this animation I did:

Weighting seems off, as far as I can tell.  There is definitely potential, here, but it just seems very embarrassing, to be honest.  I've asked for help on Blender Artists.  Waiting for any clear advice that'll help me improve on there.  Hopefully by the time the more sophisticated character animation comes along in the film (Parts 3 and 4), we'll have some pretty solid animation ready for the heavy stuff.

Otherwise, I think the film will sag under the weight of the failure at animation, and probably collapse.

Hopefully that doesn't happen!

Dan

Plagarus Part Two Update (Again)

Working on a movie by yourself can be pretty daunting.  The biggest problem seems to be discouragement, believe it or not.  The general quality of all aspects of the film seem to suffer when one person has to work on basically everything.  And when you're a perfectionist who must send stuff out without being up to your standards...

Unfortunately, it actually may take more time and effort to coordinate with others than to simply do it all myself.  In the end, Plagarus won't be the best movie out there, but it'll be the best I can produce in the time frame we're looking at. :)

  

Considering that it's my first movie I've ever actually made, I'd say that's saying something.

 

Dan

Plagarus Part Two Update

Just one more shot of the conversation scene in the Plagarus Part Two.  Then we're onto a nice, fairly easy musical interlude.  Hopefully it works well.

New rendering techniques have made the rendering times much faster.  For instance, the original Plagarus scenes were extremely noisy due to the fact that I had to use CPU rendering, while keeping render times reasonable.  Now that I've got a pretty good graphics card, GPU rendering has allowed render times of less than a quarter what it used to be on the i7.

Also, I've discovered that I don't need to have the background geometry involved in many scenes.  The shot above is taken with a simple equirectangular background image.  The advantage of this is that there is nearly instant rendering time for background elements, as well as the camera can pan, letting the background image move with it.

The downside, of course, is that it's almost impossible to completely merge it with the real background geometry when rendered for real.  So, the room will appear slightly different between shots where geometry is rendered and it's just the character in front of  a backdrop.

Also, there is the benefit of having better DOF effects in Cycles than before.  This is a huge advantage as well.  Additionally, something new since the release of the previous installment of Plagarus is motion blur.  This is a particularly useful technique which greatly increases the believability of the animation.

The downside? The next installment of the movie is probably going to start looking visually different from Part One.  This is going to be an issue which may involve me having to go back and re-render the entire thing.

There was a chance I had to do this anyway, as I was hoping technology would advance enough to allow me to render a 1080p version of the movie.  Right now, it's in 720p.

Hopefully one day this film will be done.

Here's hoping, anyway.

Dan

SSD, 16

The original was 8000px across.

Why are greebles so ugly yet add such beauty?

Dan

SSD, 15

Some debate as to what these sensor domes actually did on a star destroyer.  When one is destroyed in Return of the Jedi on the bridge of the Executor, that ship lost its bridge deflector shields.  Many assumed, then, that these globes were the shield emitters for the ship's bridge.  In reality, they are sensor domes.  Some have suggested they serve a dual purpose, where the domes also house or serve as mounts for the shield emitters as well.

It's possible the director thought it would be most dramatic to show one of these huge domes exploding as a prelude to the scene of Executor's destruction, instead of a relatively minor bit of greebling on the hull somewhere which actually served as the fictitious shield emitter.

Dan

SSD, Day 14

Inspiration coming from Ansel Hsiao's incredible "murder wedges".  He's an expert in Star Destroyer design and detailing.

Super Star Destroyer, Day 7

So, after a week of working off and on on the project (family visiting and we've been running everywhere!), I've gotten to this point:

Figuring out greebles as I go.  I thought I knew about greebles.  Nothing like ILM's starship design team to force you to reconsider what you know about that kind of stuff.

Dan