Revisiting Andy's Genesis Demo Storyboard

[Bradster]

Gosh... I can't believe it's 2009 already. The years have flown by, as have the unrealized ideas for various Star Fleet projects. It's been, what, eight years since I first started cobbling together my first 3d X-Bomber model and posted it on Andy's old forums? I've gone through college, found a career I enjoy, and got marred... what a ride.Reminiscing aside, the upcoming DVD release keeps reminding me of the little things I've wanted to do with Star Fleet that I keep putting off. One of those that I'm interested again in completing is an animation of Andy's 18-panel Demo Storyboard.So, over the past few weekends, I've been toiling with my 3D models again. I've experimented with making Star Fleet-like blue space backgrounds and some lumpy asteroids. I scoured my old videos for decent shots of the cargo fleet and recreated the cargo ship from scratch. I dropped a Mars texture into a sphere. And what do I get?Throw in my other models and I think that now I can make a decent pass at Andy's old storyboard.Last night I arranged an animation for the first few panels. It doesn't have any sound yet, but I think it's a fine start!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W8wdXsk1CY (YouTube seems to be screwing up the playback speed in the high quality and HD versions. So, just watch the regular version. Any YouTube experts here know why?)X-Bomber continues to be a work in progress. Once I finish the engine details and fix a few textures, I'll be able to copy it over and render the video again.Next up I need to figure out how I'll handle the weapons and explosions. "Beam" weapons like they had in the show are terribly difficult to create and manipulate in 3D. (At least, I don't know of an easy way to do them.) So, I'm thinking I may make the laser torpedoes actually be torpedoes like the glowing torpedoes of Star Trek and Star Wars lore. Any opinions or thoughts on that?

[Happosai]

Looking good! Certainly a lot of potential for fan-made Star Fleet material, especially if anyone's good at using something like Poser for the characters (although the voices may prove to be a bit tricky...).[Happosai]

[AndyThomas]

Sweetness I remember when I was messing around, my beam weapon was just a thin cylinder that had some sort of "glow" setting - if it just existed for a couple of frames at a time you'd probably end up with a pulse laser sort of effect? No idea how to implement that of course, not enough time to mess around now... Eight years...!

[Crash]

Yeah, I didn't reply to this right away. I wasn't quite sure how to get across how impressed I was.I've found that even in 2D 360' laser weapons are a cow to make work. It takes some real trickery to manage it.The ship did certainly have pulse lasers (blue), (like the lasers from Star Wars). It also fired machine-gun-like tracer from certain points like point-defences.I'm not sure I like the idea of the X-Bomber firing Trek Photorps exactly but there are ways around using solid beams. It would still be nice to have the wing-lasers fire on occasion. They did fire a solid beam and caused a massive napalm explosion when they hit something.

[Shane]

You could even import the footage into something like After Effects and approach the laser effects in a similar way as the original production team did. A couple of 2d laser animations superimposed over the footage would definitely give it that X Bomber/Star Fleet feel.I used to mess around with Poser quite a lot, and was fairly good at animating characters. The problem arises from actually building the characters themselves, and their costumes/equipment etc. I'll have to try and find the TROM teaser one-day to highlight this.But, that's a Great video there Brad, I remember copying and pasting various ships onto backgrounds to realise Andy's B&W line drawn versions many moons ago. It's quite uncanny seeing them come alive.

[Crash]

That's a very good thought! I think Dave might be your man there to help you with that.He's got a lot of Youtube videos where he's worked with this Adobe Post-Production stuff.

[Zordon]

thanks crash, Yeah I dabble in effects and make my own films.just head too youtube and search for Redeagleranger1 i've got a shed load of videos with various effects i've produced over the last 2 years.if your after lasers and blasts yep pretty easy to pull off. just send me your footage in DV High Avi format (WMV has a setting for this)my e-mail is redeagleranger1@yahoo.co.uk

[Zordon]

I've just thought you might have to do all your footage on seerate layers.what I meen by this is you'd have your back ground layer, a star and planet layer, weird space atmoshepre layer. then you'd have your ships, any shadow layers. then your lazers and blasts. it takes some rigging up (and about 15 hours just to get it too look right for one scene)

[felice]

(AndyThomas @ Jan. 28 2009,22:30)QUOTEmy beam weapon was just a thin cylinder that had some sort of "glow" settingI'd recommend using that as a starting point, and touching it up in 2d afterwards to look pretty. That way you get the positioning and perspective right without any trouble.

[Crash]

That's a good idea - you could have a single travelling bullet and then trace the trajectory of it with 2D animation. I love the laser torpedoes - I hope you guys get it looking awesome heehee.