🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <C380DM.I6G@watserv2.uwaterloo.ca> mplumb@sciborg.uwaterloo.ca (Marc Plumb) writes:
>In article <1993Feb26.161936.22223@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> lindsey@sna.co.umist.ac.uk (Peter S Lindsey) writes:
>>alan@xserver.uts.amdahl.com (Alan Bomberger) writes:
>>> I was disappointed by Babylon 5.
>>>   1) The show was totally dull and poorly written
>
>This is more a matter of taste. The slow pacing didn't bother me - I thought
>it worked with the genre.
>
Agreed.  The pacing of the script (which was a bit more believable than most
scripts on either ST shows) fits the longer format.  If B5 makes it as a
series, you can expect the pacing to pick up so that you can have a complete
plot stuffed into 22min portions (minus commercials). 

>>> It LOOKED like a computer animation.  The surfaces were
>>> unnatural and the physics of the motion was competely
>>> wrong.
>>Even some sort of 3d Bezier interpolation would be a vast improvement. If 3D 
>>modelling artists did what Disney did in the 50s&60s and studied the real life
>>motion of the objects he or she was trying to model, the result would be 
>>astonishing.
>
>The motion in Disney films is hardly realistic. The characters squish
>and stretch in ways that I newer could. What animators do have
>experience at is adding unnatural distortions to the still pictures to
>better suggest motion. Disney's physics is totally wrong, but it looks
>right to us.
>
This isn't correct.  "Disney physics" aren't totally wrong.  Disney's rules
for motion are based on the way people move...squash and stretch, arcs, etc.
What an animator does (a good one) is take any motion and extract its essense
or gesture.  Each motion is made clear and broad so that you can read it
correctly.  If you were to copy human moves exactly, the audience wouldn't
see each move and might be wondering,"what did they just do?" while the
animator has gone on to other business, which is very bad.

"Realistic" human motion looks like crap.  Just check out any rotoscoped
motion or motion capture example.  The weakest animated characters at Disney
were the human characters, because the animators used human timing (and a
bit of roto) to do their motion.  Most CGI animators don't understand this,
and a healthy chunk of traditional animators don't either.

>On the other hand, the physics of the ship motion in B5 looked right to
>me; everything moved in straight lines (maybe spinning a little). Real
>zero-G motion looks wrong to us since we're so used to curved balistic
>paths and fighter planes twisting and turning in dog fights. In space,
>things keep moving in straight lines unless they fire a thruster to
>turn. (If you want silly physics you can look at the movie Star Trek V
>(I think it was V, the save the whales one) where shuttle craft loose
>power and for some reason this makes them go off course slightly and
>come to a stop.)
>
Babylon was too still.  It's center was rotating, but it wasn't orbiting
the planet.  Several shots were lock-offs to the ship and there was no
movement in relation to the planet it was orbiting.  Now, they could be in
a synchronous orbit WITH the planet, but then there would have been movement
with relationship to the light source and the stars.

>Similarly the lighting looked like they used a single point source,
>which is correct (and looks like the real space scenes that I've seen)
>even though it seems fake to my earthly sensibilities. Maybe B8 should
>use more diffuse (or multiple) light sources, like ST:TNG or SW, but
>that would involve using incorrect physics to try and make the space
>scenes look right to our incorrect sense of how things should look.
>
>I'm not necessarily saying that faking the physics is wrong (I like a
>lot of Disney films), just that it is wrong to complain that the
>current computer graphics in B5 aren't realistic.
>
Most people won't understand the explosions either.  People have become
accustomed to seeing ILM's handiwork (huge, fiery explosions in space).
Foundation's explosions were fairly realistic, but this point, along with
the more realistic motion, will go unappreciated by most.

>


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