CGI v. models

[Uraniun235]

Is it just me, or are the ship visuals in the old ST movies when they used models simply better than their current work with CGI?

Frankly, the refit-Constitution looks a lot more convincing than the E-E.

[Alyeska]

Is it just me, or are the ship visuals in the old ST movies when they used models simply better than their current work with CGI?

Frankly, the refit-Constitution looks a lot more convincing than the E-E.

Depends on the movie. The models in TWOK were inciredlby detailed and the VFX was very well done. Insurrection used a fair amount of CGI and it didn't look so good. Nemesis was 99% CGI and I was surprised how well they did with it.

[Darth Wong]

CGI can look very good if it's done right. However, it also creates the freedom to make absurd-looking models. A real model is somewhat constrained by the simple mechanics of the situation: the model must be built well enough to hold together and not flex noticeably while being manipulated on a robot arm.

This constrains modelmakers and keeps overly artistic types from being too fanciful (read: "fucking stupid") and making models that look like they'd fall apart in a light breeze (see Romulan Valdore-class light cruisers).

[Alyeska]

CGI can look very good if it's done right. However, it also creates the freedom to make absurd-looking models. A real model is somewhat constrained by the simple mechanics of the situation: the model must be built well enough to hold together and not flex noticeably while being manipulated on a robot arm.

This constrains modelmakers and keeps overly artistic types from being too fanciful (read: "fucking stupid") and making models that look like they'd fall apart in a light breeze (see Romulan Valdore-class light cruisers).

Physical models also would have gotten rid of the whole Scimitar unfolding bit. That was REALLY stupid. Sure it looked cool but it was compeltely useless.

[Darth Wong]

Physical models also would have gotten rid of the whole Scimitar unfolding bit. That was REALLY stupid. Sure it looked cool but it was compeltely useless.

I agree, it was really stupid. In the beginning of the movie they can deploy the radiation from a small disc-shaped device, and now they need some fancy unfolding-wing transforming starship to release the same kind of radiation? Ugh.

[consequences]

Should have been some sort of pod in that hangar bay that can be launched and then unfold. Or as I said watching it "Oh, The Macross Transformation Brainbug, again".

[Alyeska]

Physical models also would have gotten rid of the whole Scimitar unfolding bit. That was REALLY stupid. Sure it looked cool but it was compeltely useless.

I agree, it was really stupid. In the beginning of the movie they can deploy the radiation from a small disc-shaped device, and now they need some fancy unfolding-wing transforming starship to release the same kind of radiation? Ugh.

No, those didn't release the radiation... Those were the targeting wings...

[Sea Skimmer]

Physical models also would have gotten rid of the whole Scimitar unfolding bit. That was REALLY stupid. Sure it looked cool but it was compeltely useless.

I don't think it even looked cool, my brain was too busy yell "WTF is this shit, just beam over the damn hand disks." Model work generally looks much better, even without large budgets. CGI can also be extremely convincing but of course has major problems with being excessive or done poorly far too often.

[Sea Skimmer]

No, those didn't release the radiation... Those were the targeting wings...

What in unholy fucking hell? They can fly around and strafe quite agile starships without them but need something that huge to target a planet? Radar could find the damn moon in 1946.

[SPOOFE]

Let me put it this way: If I ever make a sci-fi movie, I will insist that they use models. Even if CG gets to the point where it is SUPERIOR. Why? So I can have the model left over afterwards to keep as a memento. Try hanging a CGI model of the Enterprise-E in the Smithsonian.

[kmart]

I think a lot of how the cg is perceived depends on what format you see the film. The CG in NEM didn't seem very good to me when I saw it in the theater, but I rented it the other day and the ship stuff looked much better than I expected on DVD. The bright light stuff, like the dock shots at the end, are still really awful, but the first ship flyby looked really good.

I say that grudgingly, cuz the ILM-built miniature of the -E for FC is awesome, and I'm sure that overall, a better look would have been achieved if they'd used that for beauty shots throughout NEM and only went to CG for extreme maneuvers, instead of using CG for all but the collision shots.

The miniature stuff in TMP has better sense of presence and scale and the windows look a ton better than the white or blue blobs that pass for windows on most cg ships ... even movies like CONTACT screw up on the windows (the seagoing ship near the end), and that is always the giveaway for me when watching 90s or newer trek tv stuff ... the windows just suck.

CG on the ENT series was almost uniformly bad ... I think I saw two good close flybys in the last ep of yr 1, but for the most part, as soon as you got close to the ship, it looked like crap.

I think the DS9 stuff in later years that used cg succeeded because they relied on lots of fleet shots so you didn't focus on one ship and see all the defects. And that is probably why most Voyager stuff I saw, with only one or two ships, did NOT work for me, not enough ships to distract away from the artificiality of the technique. Though I did see some borg show with huge amounts of stuff and that one didn't work for me either, come to think of it.

If they had the money to spend (which I guess they don't), Trek could really stand to change its whole visual focus back to miniatures ... as is, it doesn't differentiate itself enormously from anything else out there, and it needs something to stand apart from the competition.

There are plenty of good model shooters out there, as evidenced by the preponderance of miniatures in STARSHIP TROOPERS and ALIEN RESURRECTION, and even other newer films are using miniatures because they can really sell the reality of a thing (PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN has really big sailing ship models, 16 - 25 feet in length, shot in water tanks AND matted into Caribbean seas, intercutting with full-size ships, and with no CG ships at all.)

[Admiral Johnason]

CGI can look very good if it's done right. However, it also creates the freedom to make absurd-looking models. A real model is somewhat constrained by the simple mechanics of the situation: the model must be built well enough to hold together and not flex noticeably while being manipulated on a robot arm.

This constrains modelmakers and keeps overly artistic types from being too fanciful (read: "fucking stupid") and making models that look like they'd fall apart in a light breeze (see Romulan Valdore-class light cruisers).

So models make the ships look a bit more realistic because the ships are forced to look structurally sound?

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Let me put it this way: If I ever make a sci-fi movie, I will insist that they use models. Even if CG gets to the point where it is SUPERIOR. Why? So I can have the model left over afterwards to keep as a memento. Try hanging a CGI model of the Enterprise-E in the Smithsonian.

I tend to be of the belief that CGI should only be used after proof-of-concept models have been constructed. If the physical model holds together, then one can create the fully textured and lighted final CGI model based on the physical model.

[Wicked Pilot]

I would say modeling is the better way to create new vessels and what not. But CGI allows you to incorporate them into film with much more versatility. Imagine if Lucas had today's CGI back in the early eighties when he did the Battle of Endor.

[neoolong]

I would think it would be cool to 3d scan a physical model and map it onto a CGI ship.

[kmart]

I would think it would be cool to 3d scan a physical model and map it onto a CGI ship.

Didn't work that well in INS though, did it? They had scanning models built for some of the ships in that film (not the big Son'a vessels, but the holoship and the son'a shuttle), plus they scanned the ILM shooting miniature from FC, and still things didn't look right. The SBS guys even made sure to include the DEFECTS in the miniature's manufacture (slight inaccuracies in tolerances and wing sag and such) but it still didn't translate all that faithfully, probably due to lighting and/or abbreviated render times.

[kmart]

I would say modeling is the better way to create new vessels and what not. But CGI allows you to incorporate them into film with much more versatility. Imagine if Lucas had today's CGI back in the early eighties when he did the Battle of Endor.

We'd probably have digital ewoks, but I don't think that would make a huge difference to the rest of the world.

If you mean the space battle part of the sequence, I don't think current CGI would have improved it at all. The ships look great in JEDI, and the moves are very dynamic despite the limitations of a model on a pole -- there are some extended shots of the Falcon dipping and flipping and flying round larger ships that look as exciting as anything I can recall. I think the final product would have been improved with more ships actually blowing up instead of having the projected in or matted flame-effects, which are a little overused.

The only noteworthy mostly-CG big space battle in the prequel films was at the end of PHANTOM MENACE (I'm discounting the tiny bit of space stuff in CLONES, since even though they had miniatures, shooting them digitally just didn't work at all for me, which is how I felt about everything in that movie), and while it looked fine technically, it didn't engage me at all, whereas all the space battle stuff in the old trilogy were thrilling to look at.

Now digital compositing ... that's a whole other isue. Digital compositing would have removed lots of matte lines, and I guess we wouldn't have those garbage mattes (the black boxes that show up on tv but didn't show in the theatre.) I thought the walkers on Endor looked matte free, but God knows the Rancor stuff was mattlineworld, just awful. But compositing isn't CG, even though there's a tendency for folks to use those few letters to group anything that isn't done with a camera and a miniature or painting.

[neoolong]

I would think it would be cool to 3d scan a physical model and map it onto a CGI ship.

Didn't work that well in INS though, did it? They had scanning models built for some of the ships in that film (not the big Son'a vessels, but the holoship and the son'a shuttle), plus they scanned the ILM shooting miniature from FC, and still things didn't look right. The SBS guys even made sure to include the DEFECTS in the miniature's manufacture (slight inaccuracies in tolerances and wing sag and such) but it still didn't translate all that faithfully, probably due to lighting and/or abbreviated render times.

Bah. You can do it pretty well for people already. Shouldn't be that difficult for ships. And I never saw Insurrection.

[kmart]

Bah. You can do it pretty well for people already. Shouldn't be that difficult for ships. And I never saw Insurrection.

INS probably won't bother you if you really honestly think they can do it decently for people, a process that I think is WAY WAY off in terms of credibility.

Christ, even the MATRIX people took a huge step backwards this last time out with their bad textures. The photographic based bullettime of the first film is so superior to this RELOADED stuff that it practically wrecked the credibility of the show this time out. I think the rush to CG on that is more related to economics and VOLUME of shots than to quality ... apparently they didn't use Snell & Wilcox interpolation software to create synthetic 'in-between' frames to augment a multicamera still rig like they did on the first one, but instead relied on mapping film images onto CG bodies ... which sounds great in theory ... but failed miserably in execution.

[neoolong]

When did I say they did it well in Reloaded?

It can be done well enough to pass in movies.

[kmart]

When did I say they did it well in Reloaded?

It can be done well enough to pass in movies.

Not for me, not by a longshot.

I cited MATRIX2 cuz if there was a film out there that had people I thought might pull it off, that was going to be the one. Even with the incredible R&D forces at ILM, I haven't seen this kind of miraculous achievement, so I figured maybe some outside of the box thinking by the ESC folks would make a difference. It didn't.

[neoolong]

Reloaded took on so much, that the quality for all the effects suffered. When it's done sparingly they can concentrate on the individual details.

[seanrobertson]

Is it just me, or are the ship visuals in the old ST movies when they used models simply better than their current work with CGI?

Frankly, the refit-Constitution looks a lot more convincing than the E-E.

Hmm...not always, necessarily. At least some of the E-E footage in "First Contact" used a studio model, so it has to look at least as convincing as the E footage.

And there are times that CGI can be pulled off even more convincingly than models. Occassionally, for instance, the E-refit and E-A seemed far too brightly lit to me; you could tell the light came from an artificial source, and that the model was terribly out of place. With graphics on graphics, no such problem exists.

But in general, I agree with you. I'll always take good models and guys in masks over CGI. I think graphics should largely be limited to distance shots or for stuff that's simply impossible to do otherwise. Purely CGI characters like 8472 or Jar-Jar Binks...no.

Just, no

[kmart]

Is it just me, or are the ship visuals in the old ST movies when they used models simply better than their current work with CGI?

Frankly, the refit-Constitution looks a lot more convincing than the E-E.

Hmm...not always, necessarily. At least some of the E-E footage in "First Contact" used a studio model, so it has to look at least as convincing as the E footage.

The FC miniature stuff (and it is nearly ALL miniature, only a few cuts are included of the CG E-E at warp and in the time vortex) does look really good, but it still doesn't rival the best shots from TMP for me, just cuz the paint job and lighting isn't anywhere near as good. They only had a scant few days on FC to do the paint job, whereas the TMP model (before ILM messed it up for ST2) has probably got the best paint job ever.

[Master of Ossus]

Good CGI looks EXTREMELY convincing. In the SW prequels, for example, and in LotR, most of the time you can't tell when CGI is being used.

The problem is that it's too easily abused. There are limits right now as to what we can do with texture, and we tend to try to use the CGI to create things that are impossible. For example, in Ep. 1, Yoda was made of a different material. It looked much better than it did in ESB and RotJ, but it really wasn't Yoda. The same is true of the E-E and some of the other ships. They sometimes look better than the actual models, but they simply don't have the right atmosphere.

I didn't especially like the CGI work in either "Nemesis" or "Insurrection." I felt that the models actually weren't as good as models on strings can look, but you have to realize that models are MUCH more expensive.

Even if you think that models are MUCH better than CGI, you can no longer justify using models for every shot. Do you really need an actual model for a ship that's only going to be in the background of a few shots? Even if the CGI model isn't as good, it also costs so much less and is so much easier to design that there's no justification to build a model of the thing.