🚀 go-pugleaf

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.

>> 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.

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.)

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.