Jump to lightspeed
computer magic - Jump to lightspeed-
I was just wondering if any one knows or has tried to recreate the classic Star Wars jump to lightspeed, and got good results? I've been giving it a bit of thought but not come up with any good ideas yet. Idealy i'd like to recreate it 100% as best I can - stars slowly come forward then a burst of speed, ship zooms off with the camera twirling.
Any suggestions?
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Coentino
"Too weird to live, too rare to die"
This is rather simple to do if you're working in 3D. Lightwave has always been packaged with a starfield object. You just need to animate this object towards the camera and turn partical bluring on. The ships in SW just zipped off into the distance without anything fancy (unlike Star Trek where they have colour screaks and stretching).
mmmm I had a feeling 3D would be the way, sadly I don't have the knowledge or cash to invest in something like Lightwave, all I have in the way of 3D is an old version of 3D Studio Max and Truespace 3
(Thanks for the advise anyway Eric )
Any other possibilities?
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Coentino
"Too weird to live, too rare to die"
I don't think you're out of luck. You can create some really nice bitmap starfields with Universe, which is good as shareware and cheap to register to get full funtionality.
If you just want the feeling of flying towards a starfield, it should be easy in any 3D app to map the bitmap to a plane of some kind and zoom the camera towards it.
If you need a true 3D look, try combining that bitmapped background with some simple tiny little white balls floating in 3D space. When the shot starts it looks like one starfield. When the camera moves, not only will the background starfield fly at you, the other 3D stars you placed in the scene will fly past the camera.
Thanks a lot for the advise, i'll look into Universe and see what I can come up with.
I'm curious now, does anyone know how the makers of Star Wars actually did this effect seeing as they didn't have access to all these 3D programs? Did they just draw it?
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Coentino
"Too weird to live, too rare to die"
If you have an old copy of max use the starfield in video post.
Add a standard camera and scale the FOV to get the effect.
Chimp
I just got this posted in my thread, perhaps it will help you...
quote:
In the original series (Star Trek TOS, to those uninitiated in the ranks of squid-dom) all of the optical effects were generated on film as CGI effects were at least 25 years away. To do the main viewscreen "moving thru the stars" effect, a star field was created, either by poking holes through a large black card, pieces of glitter on black velvet, whatever. This was set in front of the camera, and the camera did a nice,long, slow zoom into the star image. The camera was backwound about 1/2 or 3/4 back to frame 1, the starfield card was switched out for another (or it was rotated 90 degrees) or otherwise made so the stars didn't line up exactly the same, and another long slow zoom was done. Then this action was repeated 'til they had a minute or two of stock starfoeld footage that was reused week after week.
There is a good possibility that each time a new zoom was done, that it faded in at the end of the shot, and faded out at the end, just to keep the stars from "popping" on suddenly. I did a starfield just this was back about 1980 in college using a Bolex.
Even more interesting was creating a warp jump effect by holding the shutter open during the zoom, creating the same stretched stars effect as seen in the first Star Wars movie. All that without the use of a computer!
by Big Al
[This message has been edited by potmonkey (edited 02-22-2001).]
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