I won't say that life has calmed down, but I've finally managed to make some time for ItB amid the insanity of my schedule. Here's a cap from the latest shot: Samsara passing low over our outdoor location.

(click "read more")

While browsing this site from a Linux box, I realised that many of the images appear extremely dark, due to the differences in the default Gamma correction between Macintosh computers and Windows/Linux machines. Macs have a target Gamma of 1.8, whereas Windows has a target Gamma of 2.2. This means that images are darker and have higher contrast on Windows machines, whereas they appear lighter and more washed-out on Macs.

So, frame by frame, the CG work continues. I finally worked out some reasonable planet-making techniques. Mostly they involve a lot of cheating with billboarded polygons and alpha channels. Planet textures are composites of cloud photos that I took on the flight from Vancouver to Seattle, and some images from Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center, which has some spectacular shots of the earth from space.

That is all.

After a long hiatus dictated by moving and getting a new job, work resumes on the ITB 3D graphics. At the moment I'm working on some promotional materials so all you fans will have something to look at while you're waiting for the main event. (now I've put my foot in it - way to increase your own workload, Matt) Anyway, here's a sneak preview:

Keep flying folks!

As you have surely seen by now, there's a new Samsara schematic picture up. It's a spinoff graphic from some stuff we'll be using in the cockpit for flight displays. The Samsara page has been expanded to explain much of the contents of the pic, mostly regarding the internal layout of rooms in the ship.

And we have our first fan art! Kudos to Sera York for that one. Hopefully the fan art page will accumulate a wide variety of entries as the project progresses.

Our webmaster's efforts have produced a Media page, where one can currently find a truly shiny Production Diary video. If you

Alrighty. The laptop is fixed. Lost the better part of a week there. Hopefully things will be trouble-free in future.

Well, all that rendering has taken its toll on my poor computer. The graphics card blew yesterday. It's quite amazing to watch your computer have a brain bleed right there in front of you. So, effects production is in limbo until a new logic board and graphics card can be shipped here and installed.

So, ran a render for 10 hours last night, and managed to produce just over 3 seconds of the full burn effect. And it looks like utter bilge. These are the joys of volumetrics (i.e. shadows cast through glowing gas), you really don't know what it's going to look like until it's rendered at full quality and resolution. So, back to the drawing board.

The first shot is now in the fine-tuning and render phase. Obviously I won't be posting actual footage here until the film is released, but there will be news, techtalk, and the odd still pic.
In response to the questions that have popped up around here and on Whedonesque, I'm using Maxon Cinema 4D to do the effects. Compositing is in After Effects, with Photoshop for texturing and tweaking. It's all running on my trusty 1.25 Ghz Powerbook.
I'm gonna start a CG thread in the forum if you've got questions.

Behold the ship. Okay, so you've seen it before, but not with it's super-duper animatable, deformable ion streams all aglow and all that good stuff. Yeah, so this is a genuine larval CG shot that will likely end up in the opening credits once it pupates...

Anyone who complains about this pic can kiss my modded stardrive, because it's not done yet.