Re: Star Trek: Retribution
 

yes its a problem at the best of time with team efforts some don´t follow through. pity

its enjoyable anyway ..

I will have to want the holodeck scene again.

Re: Star Trek: Retribution
 

Thanks for the explanation for the voice cast. Did you do most of the voices yourself?

I figured you had to be working on this for years. Your hard work certainly paid off. I noticed a couple rough spots but most of the animation was smooth. Though, those could have been due to the film itself, the fact that it was streaming or the Nvidia driver for Linux. I was watching the video in Chromium (the open source version of Google Chrome) on PCLinuxOS. Every now and then, I see funky stuff happen with video that's fine in Windows due to the Linux video card drivers.

Spoiler You mean the Price is Right set?

I don't have a problem with that. We've seen on lots of episodes where various characters have had fascinations with the past. Picard and Data recreated Shakespeare plays on the holodeck all of the time. Additionally, Picard also had his Dixon Hill fixation, Data loved Sherlock Holmes. Tom Paris on Voyager was a huge 20th century buff. He recreated all kinds of 20th century stuff on the holodeck, he even built a car on there. B'Elanna even replicated a TV for him once so that he could watch it in their quarters. Trip Tucker on Enterprise loved old horror films. There are other examples but I've made my point. ;)

So, Garr being a 20th century buff and liking that particular TV show was not a problem for me. (for the record, I love that show also, so at least he has good taste) The truth is, we have no idea how popular media of today will be accepted 300+ years in the past. A show, song, book, whatever, that we find dreadful might become some future person's love. So, for me personally, what you did works just fine for me.

Unless that wasn't what split the fans. :nervous:

BTW, did you guys build that set or was it pulled from the PC game and converted? Either way, it was beautiful. :D

Re: Star Trek: Retribution
 

I did all of them myself. :) For Reyf, the pitch was simply lowered by 10%. You can tell I'm voicing him though because he and Garr pronounce certain things the same way. Also, "Dennis Gard Robb" is an anagram of "Brandon Bridges." :)

Spoiler You mean the Price is Right set?

Yes, yes I do :)

Nope, that's what split the fans :) (Well, that and the piano version of the theme from King of the Hill that Reyf is listening to in his quarters early on!) As I said, that split the fan base right down the middle, between those who thought its shock value made it perfect for Garr's character, and those who thought it didn't show his insanity nearly so well as it showed mine.

You guys? Specter was all me :) That's why it took so long, I did everything from start to finish! But no, this wasn't from the video game, I built that set through six years of painstaking research. We have Golden-Road.net to thank for a lot of the reference material I used (you'll notice the site's name appears during the end credits), along with HD screencaps from the current seasons of the show, and consults with actual staffers (again, see end credits). I'm very proud of that set because it's as accurate to the real thing as it's possible to get--you can even see the producers' tables off to the side, which feature fully detailed control panels and everything.

I'm going off on a tangent, but on the subject of sets recycled from other franchises: the Dimensional Portal Room from the Technodrome (classic TMNT cartoon) and a redressed version of the Genomex set (Mutant X TV series) also appear as rooms in Garr's laboratory complex. :) I'm going to try to keep that to a minimum this time, but we'll see.

Re: Star Trek: Retribution
 

I bow to your superior skill and awesomeness.

I've thought about doing what you did with Spectre and doing a one-man-show kind of deal with a CG animated film (not that long, though.) However, the sheer enormity of such a project gives me pause. Even using other peoples' meshes (which I rarely do because I hate converting meshes) it would be a huge undertaking. You are certainly very high on my list of cool people right now. You did that all yourself. Wow. :shock:

Re: Star Trek: Retribution
 

@evil_genius: now you know why it took four and a half years :) Those sets didn't build themselves, you know! That's also why Retribution is going so much faster, because now I have all the source material already made, constructed, and lit, and so it's just plug and play.

Re: Star Trek: Retribution
 

Yeah, I don't think I'd want to do everything myself. For one thing, rigging characters in trueSpace is a PITA. I've been trying to learn Blender but it's been slow going, even slower since I got involved in a project in late 2010 that required actual skills, so I had to default back to trueSpace for that project instead of trying to bumble around in Blender.

BTW, what kind of hardware did you use to render everything?

Re: Star Trek: Retribution
 

If characters are your hangup, do what I do: cheat :) 97% of my character animations are Poser animations rendered against a bluescreen, with the backgrounds matted in later. Most of the remainder (those with moving cameras) are still Poser animations, just rendered with a matte painting in the background to facilitate the camera motion. The remaining 1% are Poser animations imported into Bryce, to make use of interactive lighting (these are the rarest because they take the longest to render). The former two are being used in Retribution, while I have yet to make use of the latter.

As for hardware, I have a total of four systems that I'm using: two quad-core Dell towers, each with 8GB RAM and multi-gigahertz 64-bit processors, which handle basically all the animations. Those systems are running Windows Vista, if you can believe that...I should've taken advantage of the inter-movie downtime to upgrade them to Windows 7, but that'll come later. Then I have a quad-core Acer Aspire 8930G (one of their Gemstone Blue line) that handles most of the still background plates, also with a multi-gigahertz x64 processor. The Poser animations were rendered on my primary development machine, a more humble dual-core system with 4GB RAM and a 2.66gHz 32-bit processor.

Here's a little tip: some of the animations I'm rendering have absolutely atrocious render times. That Price is Right set from Specter is one example--a simple 5-second (150 frames, 1128x480 frame size) animation could take as much as eight days to render, and that Voyager bridge is almost as bad, with each 1128x480 frame needing around eight hours to render (so just think about how long that one scene that had a bunch of shots of the Voyager bridge took to put together!).

My answer to this is to do one of two things:
1. Partial Renders - to the frustration of some of my viewers, background plates have appeared in some preview and demo clips that are heavily pixellated and very much only partially done. What I'll typically do is get just enough of a background plate rendered so you can tell what it is (or less than that if it's not important), and then move on with production while one of my secondary machines renders the full plate. When ready, the full plate can be easily substituted for the "quickie" in my video editor.

2. Rough Animatics - I discovered this approach while working on Scene 38, but it's a good trick because in situations where you need the entire background animation or plate and you need it quickly, because it matters that much, the solution is to render the shot using the least memory-intensive settings possible. In Bryce, this means turning off shadows, reflections, refractions, transmissions, turning off anti-aliasing and turning on the Preview Render option. This will give you a render at the proper frame size really quickly, which has the added benefit of allowing you to see if the camera motion you've made will work the way you want it, and also allowing you to line up any other effects or Poser shots you might need. Then, as before, while I move on with production, the two secondary computers do the render work, and when the real one's ready, like before, the real ones can be easily subbed in for the quickies.

Re: Star Trek: Retribution
 

Thanks for giving me the lowdown on hardware.

I need to get a quad core. I bought a motherboard that could handle one when I built my PC but the price was right (ha) on a dual-core and I was on a budget, so i bought that. Though, from the sound of things, if I want to get serious about animation, I need at least a couple more computers. My other computer is an Athlon single-core, I might be able to do some light animation on it, but that would involve installing Windows on it (ugh) or learning how to animate in Blender. Right now I mostly just do flybys with blinking lights and camera movement and things like that but I'd like to get into some more serious animation. Your films are motivating to that end, they make me want to go animate everything right now. :D

Re: Star Trek: Retribution
 

"They make me want to go animate everything right now."

Beware these words :) As I said, Specter took four and a half years of building, rebuilding, rebuilding again, and just plain patience. I would urge you to be patient in what you do, there were some points during Specter when I got in a hurry and cut corners, but it came back to haunt me every single time. My strongest advice is to take things one step at a time, be efficient as I described earlier but also, be aware that if you cheap out on set design or character animation, your product will suffer greatly. (I'll give you an example from Specter when I cheaped out and I still hate myself for it: there's a scene where Data and Reyf are talking to Dr. Falwell via subspace, and they're both basically just standing there the entire time, little or no movement, and to me that amounts to a boring scene! Much less dynamic than the two scenes that bracket it)

Re: Star Trek: Retribution
 

Dude, you're preaching to the choir. I'm meticulous to the point of being anal retentive when I build and render anything. I'll stop a 24 hour render at hour 23:59 if I think something isn't right, go back and rework it and then start the render again. In fact, that's probably why I don't get things done as quickly as I'd like to. I'd probaby take at least a decade to do anything near as complex as Spectre. Aside from being anal retentive, I also get bored and have to take "breaks" from time to time.

Re: Star Trek: Retribution
 

Alright folks, next one's up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU7EvRAGB3k

Just a note about this one, I need help picking out a piece (or pieces) of score to put behind this scene. By turns, I need something that's dark and suspenseful, then somber, then towards the very end starting to pick up just a bit, perhaps in preparation for a montage sequence. I'd appreciate any suggestions you might have :)

Re: Star Trek: Retribution
 

Schweet. I was just looking for something to do. :D

Great stuff, I'm liking this movie so far.

Re: Star Trek: Retribution
 

Lookin' good. For that music suggestion, I suggest maybe something from "The Black Hole".

Re: Star Trek: Retribution
 

Yeah looks great.... I will have a think about the music too.

one question . have you picked a composer that your like for the over all feel.

like you know a Goldsmith or a Williams musical score no matter the film with in a large degree of accuracy, at least for me.

In this case looking at your production for this, I would look at Goldsmith.

also there is the possibility to edit some musical scores or instances and perhaps create a piece to fit. (This is what I was think would be possible for the trek fan film I was working on and I was looking at the
work from Goldsmith or Horner).

Barry´s Black hole would have the elements your looking for but for the continuity of the film you should stick as much as possible with one composer.

That´s how I "think" I would do it, never having done it before .

Re: Star Trek: Retribution
 

Danny Elfman is good at dark music. I don't know if you have any of his music or not.

Re: Star Trek: Retribution
 

The thing to remember is that no one composer will fit every scene perfectly. Remember how in Specter I had music from eighteen separate artists (twenty-four if you count the folks behind the covers of various pieces of ST music, and twenty-eight if you count the pop songs and TPiR theme).

I've got a vast library of music at my command, but the problem is I haven't listened to it all. With everything from the Lost in Space movie score to The Ron Jones Project, to all the Star Trek film scores (including the full scores that haven't been released commercially), chances are somewhere in there I've got something that would work perfectly...it's just a matter of finding it. I'm hoping that various people out there might've listened to some of these, and together you guys might have heard this whole collection, and someone might know of a piece that will work well.

Re: Star Trek: Retribution
 

I have a large collection too, some of those you mentioned.

I heard a piece from Star Trek Insurrection "The Prime Directive" . not really sure but you could tweak it

Re: Star Trek: Retribution
 

But say Jerry goldsmith has a vast musical catalogue with the same undertones, different films but you know its him. ok it take a lot of work to find it. and when it does not you then use another... but I am just throwing ideas out there. I understand your difficulties as they stand..

Re: Star Trek: Retribution
 

Alright folks, last preview clip is up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq59DsBtVXI

Now unlike the previous ones, this one skips over some time between it and the previous clip. By the time of this clip, the Fitzgerald has cloaked and is safely an route to New Romulus at warp 9.

Re: Star Trek: Retribution
 

That looks good . good scene . I was listen to some music with this and I liked free minds from ST 5 Final Fronter.

I will have a listen to this again from the start to see if I can build an an alternative catalogue for you, if you want.

to use or discard as you wish... but it would be better if you could also at some time post it without the music in your vids.. that distracts me from forming idea...

but only if you want. I don´t want to add difficulty to your production. but it might give you some other ideas.. I can also do this via PM if you want to keep it under wraps more