Flare Sci-Fi Forums: Transporter room; ne1 have LCARS textures?

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Posted by seanr (Member # 277) on August 24, 2000 08:45 AM:

First off, I need to credit Resistance at the Scifi-Art Forums for the inspiration to do this scene. His transporter room is really quite remarkable.

This version is a post-movie, pre-TNG era transporter room. The transporter pads themselve are actually backlit, just like the real thing, using an object painted with the translucent plastic reflectance shader, with the lights actually inside the object, plus another object on top painted with standard Caligari Reflectance (has raytracing stuff missing from the phong reflectance shader) for the shiny reflecting surface. With this method, I am able to sit objects on the pad and actually have them be lit correctly from below. All details are modeled with the exception of the bomp maps on the floor and on the side walls of the transporter chamber itself. The lighting is intentionaly dim, so you may want to adjust your monitor brightness if they appear too dark on your monitor (they're fine on mine, but you never know).

This is still a work in progress and comments/suggestions are welcome as always.

If anyone has TNG era textures for the control console and the wall panel behind it, I'd appreciate it greatly if you could send them to webolutionary@webolutionary.com . I plan on changing the color scheme, but need the TNG textures to use as a base and don't have access to them here, so if anyone has a good clean scan of the TNG panels, I'd be forever indebted to you if you sent them to me.

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Sean Robertson
webolutionary@webolutionary.com

WEBolutionary Consulting Services
Mania-Online

"Great is the glory for the strife is hard"
- Wordsworth

"Why must I be surrounded by frickin' idiots?"
- Dr Evil

Posted by Dat (Member # 302) on August 24, 2000 10:25 AM:

Nice, but wrong forum for this thread. It needs to be moved over to the Designs and Creativity forum. So will one of the mods move it there?

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Teddy Roosevelt: "Speak softly and carry a big stick."
Yosemite Sam: "Well, I speak loudly and I carry a bigger stick...and I use it too!"

Posted by Aethelwer (Member # 36) on August 24, 2000 10:39 AM:

Sure.

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"I'd like to have a hard one, though..." - Fabrux

Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on August 24, 2000 12:57 PM:

WOW! Cool. Can I suggest two things...

Can you lighten the picture... I can hardly see anything...

Secondly, those white wall lights and some ceiling lights, can you put some 'texture' in them... Thats one of my biggest gripes with CGI work... lights aren't just flat white... It makes the whole scene too sterile. The transporter lights at the top are more like what I mean. WOW! Though... WOW!

Andrew

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"I threw bitter tears at the ocean
But all that came back was the tide..." 'I Will Not Forget You' Sarah McLachlan

Posted by seanr (Member # 277) on August 24, 2000 03:48 PM:

Thanks for the comments (and for putting it in its place

Regarding the light level, I've looked at them on two different machines and they are fine on both. You probably need to adjust the gamma on your monitor. Adobe Photoshop 5.5 comes with a tool for doing so, you'll have to search the net if you want a freeware tool. If none exist, you can at least turn the brightness up on your monitor some. I actually have mine quite low and I'm still able to see them fine.

As for the light panels themselves, if you look at any of the reference shots of the various TNG sets with such light panels, you'll see that they actually are pure white. If you have "The Art of Star Trek", go to page 79 and look at the pictures of the engineering set, the page 249 for the Star Trek V: TFF bridge set, and finally, page 263 for the Star Trek VI: TUC bridge set. In all those pictures (and plenty others not listed here, the light emitting panels do appear pure white, at least when seen through a camera.

BTW, here's an update. I decided to go ahead and create my own okudagrams by combing and editing existing images obtained from a variety of sources on the web. The colors have been tweked in photoshop, and in many cases, extra parts were created and added manually (such as the transporter pad diagram and power bars on the control console).

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Sean Robertson
webolutionary@webolutionary.com

WEBolutionary Consulting Services
Mania-Online

"Great is the glory for the strife is hard"
- Wordsworth

"Why must I be surrounded by frickin' idiots?"
- Dr Evil

Posted by Dat (Member # 302) on August 24, 2000 04:45 PM:

Even better! Though the actual lighting in the room appears to be dark. I'm not sure if it's intentional, but I think a brighter room looks better.

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Teddy Roosevelt: "Speak softly and carry a big stick."
Yosemite Sam: "Well, I speak loudly and I carry a bigger stick...and I use it too!"

Posted by Fabrux (Member # 71) on August 24, 2000 05:05 PM:

As for the large wall display, I think the ones in TNG have large LCARS bars. It looks too cluttered right now IMO

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"Weirdness doesn't frighten me. Ten-foot-tall purple wombats with shaving-cream-covered broadswords singing 'Kumbayah'... Now, that scares me..."
-Tim Nix

Posted by seanr (Member # 277) on August 24, 2000 05:06 PM:

Thanks. The dim lighting is intentional. I subscribe to the Nicholas Meyer theory of set design: dim, with a militaristic touch - an almost submerine quality.

Posted by seanr (Member # 277) on August 24, 2000 05:12 PM:

The wall display closest to the main entrance is intentionaly cluttered. It is an engineering diagnostic display, with each button an indicator representing the status of a specific peice of equipment connected to the transporter. If something were to break down, the corresponding indicator would turn yellow or red, making it easy for the engineering team to quckly identify and resolve problems. Since it isn't used by ordinary crew members, it can afford to be cryptic and compact.

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Sean Robertson
webolutionary@webolutionary.com

WEBolutionary Consulting Services
Mania-Online

"Great is the glory for the strife is hard"
- Wordsworth

"Why must I be surrounded by frickin' idiots?"
- Dr Evil

Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on August 24, 2000 08:16 PM:

OK, maybe I didn't explain myself properly... the room needs to be BRIGHTER! OK, even if you subscribe to the Nick Meyer way of lighting... you could still see the walls in Star Trek: VI.

Re the white lights... yes the lights on the TV series might be pure white... what I'm getting at is that with CGI the first thing that makes it a dead give away is the way light interacts in the picture. Light isn't just 'no black' which the wall lights seems to be... there has to be some variation... some texture... the lights DO go through a panel... so why not break up the 'white' a bit with something transparent... otherwise it just looks as white as the background to this text box I'm typing in!

Very nice though.

Andrew

P.S. I hope you don't mind, but I've brightened it up a little...

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"I threw bitter tears at the ocean
But all that came back was the tide..." 'I Will Not Forget You' Sarah McLachlan

[This message has been edited by AndrewR (edited August 25, 2000).]

Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on August 28, 2000 10:07 PM:

I must apologise... It REALLY does have to be the computer that changes things... At home all of those pictures are as dark as anything... and even some of the computers at uni...

I'm on a different computer at uni and everything is so bright!

Yup, I guess its the monitor.

Andrew.

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"I threw bitter tears at the ocean
But all that came back was the tide..." 'I Will Not Forget You' Sarah McLachlan

Posted by seanr (Member # 277) on September 01, 2000 01:33 PM:

One final update:

Also, another room on the same ship:

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Sean Robertson
webolutionary@webolutionary.com

WEBolutionary Consulting Services
Mania-Online

"Great is the glory for the strife is hard"
- Wordsworth

"Why must I be surrounded by frickin' idiots?"
- Dr Evil

Posted by Teelie (Member # 280) on September 01, 2000 08:46 PM:

Yes very nice but dark. I could never do this kind of work myself though.

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Where's the bathroom on this ship?

Posted by Fabrux (Member # 71) on September 02, 2000 03:16 AM:

I think you might need to turn up the brightness in the core room just a tad. If you've noticed, none of the core rooms seen on the shows/movies have been dark enough to have shadows from the core playing on the walls

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"Incest! A game the whole family can play!"
-Jonah Rapp

Posted by Mikey T (Member # 144) on September 02, 2000 02:09 PM:

Nice pictures, but what kind of starship goes with the pictures? An Ambassador Class perhaps...

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Searching for some peace of mind
Hey I'll help you find it
I do believe that we are practicing the same religion
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Posted by Fabrux (Member # 71) on September 02, 2000 02:31 PM:

See the thread "U.S.S. Midway - NCC-3100-A"

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"Incest! A game the whole family can play!"
-Jonah Rapp