

However, the thing that throws me is the blurring of the noise towards the front of the ship, takes on a different characteristic based on the distance to the camera and I’m not sure I’d think to change that up in CG. On the bottom one the color shifts are too uniform, it looks like you used Photoshop noise, didn’t click monochrome and then just tweaked it. The other reason is the noise/grain, on the top it looks monochromatic, uniform in color while nicely random in intensity. On the other hand, the pristine detail of the top really looks like it a still photo, not a moving frame, the lack of motion blur tells me it’s physical.

For me it just seems like the motion blur is a little off, I’m not entirely sure what is tipping me off to it but it feels wrong. I’m going to go with the crowd as well and guess that the bottom one is CG. I’m particularly impressed with Brian near the top with his comment about the star you can see through the cockpit and the traveling matte. Wow, hat’s off to your readers, there are some very sophisticated reasons you guys at giving for why the bottom image is CG and the top is a real model. I kinda hope you make a fool outta me… lol The real one has a slightly ‘bluer’ color to it overall… I don’t know what the show used, possibly 35mm lens? Is that what the CG one was rendered with? The real one has a wingtip showing on the far side, the CG one doesn’t… which leads me to believe the lens mm is off a bit. The render camera needs some adjustment too, to really get an exact angle on the render. The upper engine exhaust has a rectangle indent on it that is lost in the rendered version, which may be fixed with stronger AO. The real one has a shadow along the nose (meaning that the whole nose is possibly a bit wider along it’s top than it’s bottom), the CG one has pretty flat lighting along the length of the nose (meaning looking at it from straight on, the CG has nose a more square shape, rather than trapeziodal shape). To make them two even closer, I think there needs to be an Ambient Occlusion boost on the CG one (notice the darker, deeper shadows of the real one), and the stars in the CG one need to be dumbed down to pin pricks on black poster board (right now, they look like rendered point-polygons).Īlso, them model geo itself isn’t a dead on match.
#Glass viper synth tv#
Very nice job though, and if this was animated on the tv with the appropriate motion blur etc I doubt I would notice it was a slipped in CGI shot. The first shot looks like a model because in the detail of joins there are lots of small imperfections, slight misalignments.Ĥ) Finally, the second image seems to have too much detail for an NTSC video image. All the parts fit together perfectly, the lighting implies that cylinders are perfectly round etc. The entire Viper has a multi coloured grain on it that I would expect to be a bit blurrier if it had been through the few layers of transfer involved in original shot -> videotape -> capture -> compression to a jpg.ģ) The second model is too good. I am going to say that the top is the original, and the bottom the CGI.ġ) On parts of the top viper you can see faint scan lines, but it isn’t consistent all over, giving the impression of an image captured from tape and then compressed.Ģ) The film grain on the second image is a little bit too clean, looking like the Photoshop film grain filter. (Of course, the bottom one could have been a really good picture of a screen grab of the original on an old fashioned cathode-ray tube TV with the curvy front that tended to warp things at the edges and with the “brightness” setting cranked up.) It’s the same techniques (aka “cheats” or “fudge factors”) that stage designers used particularly in the Restoration theatre. It “flattens” things and reduces the “depth” axis.īy using models (an actual object) and lighting, the original FX crew emphasized the depth axis to get the illusion of a 3D object across on a flat medium (film, videotape, whatever). It’s the same thing as Balanchine noted about TV. The Centurions may have been a nightmare to film, but the shiny armour looks so good.) (The lighting crew of the original did a magnificent job, by the way. The bottom one looks “bent”.Īlso the lighting of the top one emphasizes the depth and volume of the viper particularly at the top between the cockpit and the fin. Why: The top one’s lines of the engine and the nose match up for perspective of an image taken of an actual object. My guess: Top one is the model viper and the bottom one is CGI viper.
