Improved Star Destroyer Bridge

As part of the ongoing process of improving texture maps, I just finished the Star Destroyer Bridge model. Here are a bunch of before-and-after comparisons:

Although it's hard to tell in these compressed images, I improved the lighting, made many of the lights (especially in the pit area) "bright," and made the textures more-accurately match the "Star Wars" movies.

Here's another comparison, this time between a reference photo from "The Empire Strikes Back" (1st picture, below) and the latest version of our Star Destroyer Bridge (2nd picture, below -- it's the same picture as above, but I included it again here for an easier side-by-side comparison):

Again, it's hard to see details in these compressed images -- it's a lot better seeing full-size images. But overall, hopefully our new-and-improved model looks more 3D and realistic.

Here are before-and-after comparisons of the alcove part of the bridge:

Again, it's hard to see the changes in these compressed images, but hopefully the "after" picture looks more 3D. If you look carefully at the surfaces, especially the door detailing and the long, vertical, chrome panels on the upper-right side of the screen, you can see them reflecting other parts of the bridge. Most of the other surfaces have some degree of reflection as well, but it's hard to see in this picture.

I also improved the detailing on the control panel (right side of the picture). Before, it was just a picture of random controls, but now there are actual, 3D controls on the panel. The reason is because we have close-up shots that required more detailed surfaces. For example:

In the old version the blue and white buttons on the bottom-right of the picture were just low-resolution pictures, but in the new version they're actual 3D buttons. I also replaced those yellow lights with blue lights, since reference photos from the "Star Wars" movies showed that Imperial Star Destroyer bridges do NOT have yellow lights -- they're only red, white, and blue.

Here's that same alcove, from a different angle:

Without going into details, hopefully the general sense you get from looking at the 2 pictures is that the "after" picture looks more 3D and realistic, whereas the "before" picture looks more CG and fake.

Here's another comparison of a different part of the alcove:

Again, if you look at the surfaces, you can see that most of them are reflective to some degree. You can see it particularly well if you look at the monitor on the top-right of the picture, the screen showing the planet in the middle of the picture, and those long, vertical, chrome panels on the bottom-right of the picture.

Here's a different part of the Star Destroyer bridge:

Here's where you can really see the difference in the texture mapping on the walls. If you look at this reference picture from "The Empire Strikes Back" (it's the same part of the bridge as above, but from a different angle), you can see that the walls have a fairly flat appearance, not all bumpy and panel-y like in our "before" picture, above.

You can also see the glass that I added to our windows (picture, above), which may have been included in a previous blog post -- I can't remember.

Here's the last before-and-after comparison, from the same part of the bridge, but looking to the right in a close-up:

Same as before -- flatter, non-panely walls and more reflective surfaces (look especially at the bottom-right of the picture -- you can see the other part of the bridge reflected in the black panel).

I think my next challenge will be improving the texture maps in Bibble's Bar. However, it may be a few weeks before my next post because texture mapping is VERY time-consuming so I don't know how long it will take...

Later,
Bob

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

Yoda, Star Destroyer, Stormtroopers, and Imperial Officer

It's been a busy week!

Theresa delivered another Yoda "lip sync" test clip:

Pretty good, huh?

Jay's ADR + Theresa's CG = CG Yoda

Yoda still has a long way to go, but he looks more and more realistic with each iteration. Theresa's spent a lot of time animating Yoda and her hard work is paying off. Very impressive...

Don't ask me why, but I decided to re-texture map the Venator-class Star Destroyer... AGAIN! Here are before-and-after shots from our "Star Tours" shot, along with a reference photo from "Revenge of the Sith":


The original Star Destroyer model is beautiful, but it was never designed for the extreme close-ups that we're using. Since our model needs to hold-up to closer scrutiny than originally intended, I completely switched some of the texture maps. If you compare the "after" picture (2nd pic) to the "Revenge of the Sith" reference picture (3rd pic), you can see that the new texture maps are much more accurate.

Here's another before-and-after comparison:

I still need to fix the texture maps on the side of that reddish sticky-outy thing, but I'll deal with it later...

Here's a before-and-after comparison from the scene when the Star Destroyer exits hyperspace over Dantooine:


Finally, here are some side-by-side comparisons with reference pictures from "Revenge of the Sith":


Especially in that 2nd pair of pictures, the lighting conditions are different, but it's close enough to check the texture maps.

We shot 2 days last week -- Stormtroopers and Imperial Officer! Sweet...

Here are before-and-after shots of Scene I524a. It's the scene in Bibble's Bar when Katinka shoots the Stormtroopers:

I LOVE the original shot, but unfortunately we didn't have a scorch mark on the Stormtrooper's armor. The original intent was to add a digital scorch mark, but it ended up being a huge pain to rotoscope and it still looked fake. :(

I racked my brain trying to figure out how to achieve scorch marks without permanently discoloring my Stormtrooper armor. We finally achieved the effect by taping black Cinefoil (cut into a "scorch mark" pattern) to the armor. It's such a simple solution that it's embarrassing that I didn't think of it sooner, but you'd be surprised how hard it was to figure out.

If you look at the Stormtrooper's chest in the 2nd picture, you can see the super-cool scorch mark. Here's a reference picture from "Star Wars" showing that blasters leave scorch marks on Stormtrooper armor:

They MUST have had rubber "stunt" Stormtrooper armor in "Star Wars," because I don't see how they could have done some of those stunts in plastic armor. I speak from painful experience. More about that later...

Anyway, here are before-and-after shots of the Stormtroopers escorting Brad in the Star Destroyer hangar:

Brad and the "Hover Gurney" Stormtrooper are still missing from this shot, and I still haven't figured out how to add realistic digital reflections in the floor, but it's still a huge improvement over the CG-only animatic (1st pic).

A few scenes later, Brad uses The Force to snatch one of the Stormtrooper's blasters:

Again, Brad and the "Hover Gurney" Stormtrooper are still missing from the revised shot. We'll add them later.

After snatching the blaster, Brad shoots the "Hover Gurney" Stormtrooper in the head:


(Brad is represented by the CG Stormtrooper until we shoot his live footage.)

That fall looks pretty real, right? Unfortunately, that's because it WAS a real (and unplanned) fall:

Ouch! Remember when my tailbone WASN'T shattered into 18 pieces? You know, back before I started peeing blood? Ah, the good old days...

Anyway, my worst fear was almost realized Monday night. I always feared that I'd accidentally fall, crack the Stormtrooper armor, pierce my kidney (or spleen, or other organ) with a sharp piece of broken armor, and bleed-out on my mats. :(

GN, BN. The good news is that I didn't pierce any important organs. The bad news is that I still fell flat on my butt. It completely knocked the wind out of me and I was sore for a few days. But you know what they say: pain is temporary, film is forever.

Lesson Learned: ALWAYS practice stunts beforehand! In this particular case, the problem is that in all other "Stormtrooper getting shot" scenes, I'd backpedel a few steps and Brad would stop me from falling over. But in this particular "shot in the head" scene, I fell straight backwards like a sack of potatoes.

When we shot the earlier animatic of this scene, Sarah caught me -- Brad wasn't there that night. Since he'd seen the animatic, I assumed he knew I'd be falling straight back. Well, never "assume," especially when your spleen is at risk. Just trust me on that one...

On the plus side, not only did we get a real fall for that scene (YES, we're keeping it, and NO, I'm not re-shooting it!), but we also got a good blooper. The actual fall isn't that funny because you hear me hit the ground pretty hard, so I had to mask the actual sound with a cartoon "falling" sound effect to make it funnier.

Perhaps even funnier is that I've literally "fallen and I can't get up!" (Now I know how old people feel.)

Since I can't bend my legs very well in the Stormtrooper armor, Brad had to lift me up. The problem is, I outweigh Brad and I couldn't bend my knees, so I was dead-weight. As a result, Brad had to use his body weight and fall backwards in order to pull me to my feet:


It was only after we were both on our feet and recovering from our mutual falls that we realized the camera was still rolling...

Anyway, after Brad shoots the "Hover Gurney" Stormtrooper in the head, he shoots the retaining clamps holding a storage container that's suspended from the ceiling:

The 1st picture shows the sparks after he shoots the retaining clamp on the right.
The 2nd picture shows the 2nd laser blast hitting the retaining clamp on the left.


The 1st picture shows the storage container starting to fall. I also like that "molten metal" look on the scaffolding where the laser blast hit. That wasn't intentional -- it was a nice side effect from the stock footage we used for the falling sparks (available for free, along with a ton of other cool stock footage, at Detonation Films).
The 2nd picture is a reference shot from "Revenge of the Sith" showing where I got the camera angle and sparks idea.
What?!? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? It's not like we're real filmmakers. We need all the help we can get!

Here's a shot that I wasn't sure we'd be able to get since we don't have a crane. It's a point-of-view shot as the storage container falls on the Stormtroopers:


The original plan was to replace all 4 CG Stormtroopers with live Stormtrooper footage. However, when I composited the shot, I realized that as the camera approaches the Stormtroopers, the perspective changes on the 3 Stormtroopers that aren't directly under the camera. In other words, at the beginning of the shot, you can only see the top of their heads. But as the camera falls towards them, you can see more of their bodies as the camera's perspective changes. Since the live Stormtrooper footage didn't have a corresponding perspective change, it looked totally fake. :(

Since we don't have motion control equipment, our only choice is to use live footage for the "main" Stormtrooper (i.e. the one who looks up a moment before being crushed by the storage container), and use CG Stormtroopers for the other 3 so that their perspective changes realistically.

Fortunately, this workaround also made my life easier when motion-tracking the live Stormtrooper footage into the shot, because I had 3 CG Stormtrooper size references that allowed me to accurately scale our live Stormtrooper to match the camera's rate of descent.

I know... I know... the live Stormtrooper looks different from the 3 CG Stormtroopers. We'll fix that later. This is still just an animatic, so I didn't want to burn a lot of time on it.

Here are behind-the-scenes pictures of how we achieved that shot without a crane -- guerrilla filmmaking at its finest!

Fortunately, Brad held the camera rock-steady, which made post-production much easier! The last thing I need is a jittery shot that I have to motion-stabilize.

Here are before-and-after shots of the next scene, which shows the storage container actually crushing the Stormtroopers:

The revised shot still lacks digital reflections, Brad, and the dead "Hover Gurney" Stormtrooper. We'll add those details later.

Here are 2 more screenshots from that scene:

CRUNCH!

The arrow in the 2nd picture shows Brad's (digital) lightsaber rolling on the floor. It falls free from one of the Stormtrooper's belts when he gets crushed. This is important, because in a subsequent scene, Brad uses The Force to retrieve his lightsaber, which he then uses to fight Darth Vader. I almost forgot to add the lightsaber to this shot, so we would have had a continuity "goof" for the astute viewer.

That wraps up the Stormtrooper footage we shot on Tue. On Thu., Sarah's dad came over to shoot Imperial Officer footage.

Here's a behind-the-scenes picture of Sarah looking on as her dad gets "in character" and practices his lines:


And here are before-and-after pictures of his scenes. The 1st one is in the Jedi Temple's central security station as he addresses a Clone Trooper:

His eye line was off (my fault), so that's why I had to move him up-and-right a bit. Also, since the digital set isn't final yet, I didn't bother to add any color correction -- that's why he looks too bright.

Here's a hologram of Imperial Officer on the Star Destroyer bridge, reporting to Darth Vader:

This was a tough scene for Mr. Stevens because it was a lot of dialogue involving lots of unfamiliar words ("holodisc," "databank," etc.). Some of his more interesting (and funny) takes involved a "homecoming beacon" (instead of a "homing beacon") and "clown troopers" (instead of "Clone Troopers"). :D

To make things even worse, about halfway through the night, Brad noticed that Mr. Stevens wasn't wearing his belt! Yes, in case you were wondering, it's completely, 100% Sarah's fault. :D

Fortunately, the other shots were too close to show his missing belt. Unfortunately, this shot (above) had to be re-done and it was his most difficult scene. So not only did he do a great job on the 1st 4 takes, but he had to re-memorize his lines and deliver another 4 takes after a long night of shooting. We're grateful to him for being such a good sport.

I' m especially grateful that Mr. Stevens delivered a great performance in the re-shoots because otherwise I would have had to digitally-add his belt to the original (beltless) footage. (I figured I could get away with a composited belt since it's a hologram and thus the seam would be harder to spot.) Fortunately, he gave strong performances in the re-shoots, so the compositing was unnecessary (phew!).

Here's an example of Mr. Stevens' great acting as he's being choked by Darth Vader:


And he also did a great job collapsing to the floor, suffocated to death:


We've shot a ton of live footage recently, and the master animatic is coming along nicely. It's amazing how much progress we've made over the past 2 months.

Jen is coming over Mon. to shoot some live footage. She's going to be the female arcade game character in the Bibble's Bar scene. I don't expect her footage to take very long, so I'm also hoping to shoot Darth Vader footage Monday night.

Later,
Bob