Remade B5 Effect Scenes

[Lemon Wolf]

Greetings.
I am currently working on a personal project and i thought it might be of interest to some of you because its about B5.
A very long time i thought about redoing the special effects of a few episodes and i finally decided to start with the episode "No surrender,no retreat"
I am using Lightwave (which was used in B5 too) to render my scenes.
Lightwave is a hobby of mine for quite some time now but i am purely an amateur so dont expect too much
The new fx are in 1280x720 so the level of detail should be a little better than the old fx. All the ships in the scenes are freely available fan made meshes.

Currently i am working on 4 different scenes 3 are finished the 4th is in work.
One major problem at the moment are my rendertimes which are extremely high(depending on the polycount upto 45mins per frame). So i guess it will take a long time until i am finished with just one episode.

Here one still of one of the scenes and the 3 finished scenes as avi files.
I used the Xvid codec for compression because the raw material is just way too much for my webspace.




Videos

[Pedrith]

Holy Crap!! Those totally kick ass! If you consider that amateur I don't even want to know what you consider Pro level. Those are better than I could ever come up with and I dabble in animation using Carrara 6 Pro.

I'm not familiar with lightwave, but if the renderer is a separate program that can just render scenes, I am more than willing to offer my Mac Pro with four processors at 2.66 ghz. I'm not sure I can encode it as xvid but I could encode it at h.264.

One you redo a whole ep may you should try and use that to get WB to rerender the whole series and edit that redone scene for Revelations with Melissa Gilbert.

Again. Totally kicks ass.

David

[timk519]

cool stuff!

[oldjoe5]

Been a long-time lurker of JMSNews and Babylon 5 fan, so I decided to register and post

I am using Lightwave (which was used in B5 too) to render my scenes.
Lightwave is a hobby of mine for quite some time now but i am purely an amateur so dont expect too much
The new fx are in 1280x720 so the level of detail should be a little better than the old fx. All the ships in the scenes are freely available fan made meshes.

Wow, all I can say is wow! Impressive work!

Currently i am working on 4 different scenes 3 are finished the 4th is in work.
One major problem at the moment are my rendertimes which are extremely high(depending on the polycount upto 45mins per frame). So i guess it will take a long time until i am finished with just one episode.

I have Lightwave installed on my quad core and could help you render scenes. It chews through pretty much anything from like butter. Encoding in 1080 with x264 goes extremely fast.

[Morden]

Great work, thanks for sharing! Looks way better than e.g. those lately re-done effects for ST:TOS. Man, I'd really like to see the whole series with those kind of effects...!

[Lope de Aguirre]

WOW - OK, it isn't perfect but it looks awesome - I would love to see the series with this kind of effects!

@ Morden

I haven't thought about that but you're absolutely right - these images look better than TOSR which is embarassing for CBS!!!

[Zoltan]

Since I've made a few animations myself (check my signature), I know what hard work it is. Would like to see (much) more from you!

One really minor point: In the last animation, the light is falling on the Whitestars from their right, but on the planet it's from their left (perhaps the original was also made like this?)

[Lemon Wolf]

Hi
Thx for your kind words. I am glad that you like what i have done so far and i hope that i can provide some more updates soon.

@oldjoe5
Which version of lightwave do you have? A quad core machine would definitely speed up things. Thx for you offer in this

@Zoltan
You got me there i havent noticed that error. Thats the disadvantage of using the exculde option under the light tab.

[oldjoe5]

Which version of lightwave do you have? A quad core machine would definitely speed up things. Thx for you offer in this

9.5, the latest version. Should be fine using files from older versions as well.

[Jan]

(I don't have anything to add to the thread but I wanted to welcome oldjoe5 out of lurkdom!)

Jan

[oldjoe5]

(I don't have anything to add to the thread but I wanted to welcome oldjoe5 out of lurkdom!)

Thanks! Been a long-time fan of Babylon 5 ever since I saw it on TV, then on DVD repeatedly.

I wasn't aware of the tremendous involvement of JMS with the community through usenet and conventions until I accidentily stumbled across this site. Which I think is a great place for all things Babylon 5.

[Morden]

@ Morden

I haven't thought about that but you're absolutely right - these images look better than TOSR which is embarassing for CBS!!!

That's exactly what I thought!

@ Zoltan: Any chance to watch your animations without having to install something...? Regarding the pics, it really seems to be worth watching what you've done!

[Zoltan]

@ Zoltan: Any chance to watch your animations without having to install something...? Regarding the pics, it really seems to be worth watching what you've done!

First of all, the links to the animations are all broken at the moment.

At the time I made them, I used Bink Video for compressing them (and making it harder for people to copy it as their own work ). Also, at the time only DivX was a viable alternative which would've need to be installed by most people since it wasn't so widespread as today.

The installer doesn't install any other software, it just to copies the files to the folder of your choosing (so people wouldn't even need to extract files from an archive). The player software (basically an exe and a dll) is already included (installed in the same folder) and removed once the animation is uninstalled.

Clean, easy and efficient.

The files are there on the server though (I can't access the HTML due to some complications) and I can provide the links for you here:

War Without End - Opening
War Without End - Part 1
War Without End - Part 2

Arrival of the Centauri Emperor

Kosh's Arrival

Earth Force One

[Morden]

Thanks for the links, Zoltan. Very nice sequences you did there, the resolution may not be very high, but the effects were done just fine, and you managed to grab the feeling of the space battles we see in the actual show!

Regarding this .exe-thing, I did it now once because I was interested in what you did, but I won't do it again. I like streaming a video or download&play it, but with your files, it came as I thought: installation process, a "do-you-want-to-update"-message once it is started, and manual removal of folders after the un-installing. No offence, you did a great job with the animations, but I don't like the process I need to go through to watch them.
Thanks anyway!

@ Lemon Wolf: So, has WB already contacted you for supervising a B5-remastered project?

[Lemon Wolf]

@oldjoe5
I am using Lightwave 9.5 aswell so there should be no problems with the scene files

@Morden
No they did not And i very much doubt that they will ever hear of this

I am still working on the next scene which should take some time due to many effects.