M’kay, an update on Act II. For the past two months I’ve been tweaking the textures on my models but I’ve also been trying to get that darn twenty-second opening shot from Act II looking the way I want it to. This is what happens when you’re self-taught… sometimes you run into the limitations of what you’ve taught yourself, and what I ran into was my inability to make it look like the Enterprise really was flying through the debris field as she desperately evaded the planet killer. After many false starts I think I’ve finally got it right… at least it looked good on the animatic! Learning how to make a model follow a curve and fiddling with matching the banking and pitching to the ship’s movements really helped a lot… here’s a frame grab from the final product which is rendering right now:

Sulu, stop texting and pay attention to your flying!

Incidentally, sometimes being as slow as molasses has its advantages… I’ve been dilly-dallying so long that technology has finally caught up and Newtek has (in the LightWave 9.6.1 beta) FINALLY fixed a very annoying bug that was causing about half of the asteroids in my asteroid fields to disappear. I’ve been using LightWave 8.5 ever since I discovered the bug but was really disappointed at having to lose some of the nice fractal procedurals when I reverted. This scene is being rendered in 9.6.1, so I have all of my nicer textures back.

So anyway, that’s where things stand now. Right now the four computers in my mini render farm are about halfway through the third concentric shell of asteroids* in my seven-layer asteroid field, so there’s still a good day or so of rendering left on that. Once that’s done I will have some final adjustments to make on the new planet killer model, and then I’ll let that scene element rip. The new translucent skin really brings the PK model alive but dang it slows down the render times. Don’t look for the opening of Act II until this time next week, is what I’m currently guessing.

____________

Tags: Doomsday Machine, Enterprise, LightWave