Improved Animatics

I've been refining our animatics, moving them another step closer closer to final footage.

I added animated streams of traffic to a bunch of the Coruscant scenes. Here's an example:

You can barely see them through the atmospheric haze, but there are now streams of traffic flying through the background. I tried to point a few of them out with the red arrows, but they're still really hard to see in this compressed image. Trust me, they look much cooler as video.

I added a hyperspace background outside Yane's shuttle. Here are before-and-after screenshots:


And here are a few reference photos of the hyperspace effect from "Return of the Jedi" and the Wookieepedia website:

As you can see, our hyperspace effect is close, but not quite final.

Also, you can't tell in the still photos, but our hyperspace tunnel rotates clockwise and moves towards the spaceship. Here's a pair of pictures taken about a half-second apart so that you can see what I'm talking about:


Finally, I fixed one of our Star Destroyer animatics. In the old version, the 3 Star Destroyers moved at exactly the same speed, which looked totally fake. Here are screenshots of the old animatic, one screenshot from the beginning of the scene and one screenshot from the end of the scene:

Here are screenshots from the new animatic:

See how much closer the nearest Star Destroyer is in the 2nd picture, above? You can also see that the leftmost Star Destroyer has moved faster than the furthest Star Destroyer.

Unfortunately, that's all I had time for last week. That hyperspace effect took much longer than you'd think. :(

Later,
Bob