CGI Starship Enterprise Warp Drive by Jim Royal

[Alltooeasy01]

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[Ferocinator]

Completely on par with the original.

[starmanvidonline]

Very impressive. I'm a HUGE Trek fan and I pay very close attention to SPFX so there's one little thing that bugs me about this: when the E goes to warp drive, it's not going far enough and fast enough. If you look at the original, the E was MUCH farther and smaller at the end than in your vid.

That said, you did a DAMN GOOD job of replicating the look of the original. The lighting and effects are badass. It just needs that boost of "speed" and it'll be perfect.

[jamesgeraldroyal]

@starmanvidonline I'll keep that in mind as I work on a more lengthy clip. Thanks!

[skyblazer7]

Fantastic!

[MLKKAEFEnterprises]

FAVORITED!

[Username3141519]

Absolutely brilliant.

I hope they use this effect again in the series.

[shakoror]

The best warp effect I have seen outside the first movie!  Great job!

[garethleslie123]

Nice...

[terranova1701]

That was excellent James

[Zachstar2000]

Wow! That was amazing! And the sound was right on!

This is EXACTLY what I would want from a "Remastered" TMP

[VideoSpaceFX]

Absolutely the best redo i've seen

[romeedee]

Wow! Great job on the tmp version.

[kaiyoshi2243]

Perfect! Well done.

[PrfMoriarty]

Holy crap! You nailed the effect so well that at first I just thought this was a clip from ST:TMP. Well done!

[jamesgeraldroyal]

@PrfMoriarty: Many thanks! Now I've got to make some time to create a more lengthy animation.

[bolden0000]

Hot damn

[doceigen]

You know, I tried to sell original duplications of the holographics, in a four camera filter package in a classified ad in the Star Trek Official Fan Club #97 June/July 1994... for $39.95. Included was this Warp effect, the Worm Hole effect, the Time Shift effect, and the Diagnostic pattern for Illya's examination... but only ended up selling a couple of paks. Fans just didn't care to do the effects from the movie.

[Lightray110]

I think that has always been my Favouret warp speed effect. Next to the JJ Abrams one.

[doceigen]

The 'idea' of originally using a holographic radial grating was to get a smooth chromatic shift from red to violet, as it was supposed, that the event horizon surrounding an Abercrombie bubble, would be ‘seen’ as a doppler shift in the visible spectrum. If I had it to do over again, instead of the multiple spikes, I would have made it look like the Enterprise was diving into a laminar funnel... but I was young and foolish.

[stuey1979]

@doceigen Please don't say you would change it if you could do it again... It is perfect the way it is!

[martok2112]

An excellent recreation! Well done! :)

[FilmmakerJ]

The best warp drive effect in all of Star Trek. It's the most flashy, and since it has that rainbow coloring, it makes it all the more exciting, even if it's not entirely fast. It's designed to be show-offy.

But that's always been the charm of it. And to see someone recreate it so well is very interesting. I applaud your effort. I don't think many people like the Motion Picture. And for very good reasons, but I always loved it for the effects and the pacing. If others don't that's alright.

[jamesgeraldroyal]

@FilmmakerJ: I agree entirely with your appraisal of STTMP, and thanks very much for the comments.

[kantlavar]

@FilmmakerJ There's a reason it's so flashy, and really for all of the lavish SFX sequences in TMP; this was the first time Star Trek had such a huge FX budget, and they decided to milk it for all it was worth. The warp effect, in particular, was supposed to be spectacular to impress fans who'd been wondering what a starship going to warp LOOKED like; remember, in TOS they never showed the Enterprise going to warp; it was always just a sound effect and the model moving off-screen.

[doceigen]

@FilmmakerJ "The best warp drive effect in all of Star Trek. It's the most flashy, and since it has that rainbow coloring, it makes it all the more exciting, even if it's not entirely fast. It's designed to be show-offy."

Gee, thanks. But no, it wasn't designed to be 'show-offy' it was designed to appear as a doppler shift. I was constrained at the time by having to use programmable 3D maps of point sources on my robotic table, but if I could do it again... I'd have made it laminar.

[myriad1973]

Absolutely Fantastic

[rolliba]

Well, it was so very well done, that I had to offer the tinest bit of feedback for an otherwise almost perfect effect. I know how hard it is to do this effect.

My attempt was this one youtu_be/RPNMI1HS36g

[rolliba]

Very Nice. It is one of the hardest effects that I've run into to get to look right.

One thing I noticed though, at the brightest part of the Lens Flare/Flash, you can see the edge of the layer.

[jamesgeraldroyal]

@rolliba Ah, yes. That showed up only after the conversion to H264. The dreaded gammna shift. It wasn't really visible in AE. :(

Still, I'm flattered that you took the time to check it frame-by frame. All the flash elements are AE effects, with the exception of the last four frames of the flash at the end, which is hand-drawn artwork (which is how they did it in the original, I suspect).

[CJCA915]

@jamesgeraldroyal I would invest VCP Optical Flares... great plugin.

[CJCA915]

Did you do the warp trail in AE?

[jamesgeraldroyal]

@CJCA915: Yep, the warp trail alone was almost 180 layers in After Effects.

[CJCA915]

@jamesgeraldroyal wow!

I wish there was a tool to make the job easier, I've been using the echo effect, with a zoom blur effect, to cut down on having to have so many layers, but it's just not practical... you'd think such an effect would be part of AE, being as it's one of the most used effects software, from what I recall...

[jamesgeraldroyal]

@CJCA915: Well, the problem with trying to create a tool in AE to do this, is that this effect requires streaking 3D geometry — NOT 2D artwork. If you try to streak 2D artwork, you get an effect similar to the terrible-looking warp drive in Star Trek 5. In order for AE to do this correctly, it would have to know something about the geometry of the object and its path of motion in 3D space. It doesn't have access to that info, so the only way to do it is to build it up frame by frame.

[CJCA915]

@jamesgeraldroyal ah, well, I know there has to be a way... or a way to do it in CG applications... however, even frame by frame, how do you blend them seamlessly together? I use a zoom blur effect, but it's rough, and requires a good bit of blur to blend the frames together...

[CJCA915]

@jamesgeraldroyal Perhaps a tool, like MAX2AE to export an object, for instance from max a dummy that is linked to the ship in the max scene, and then import into AE as null object that's a 3D layer, so it moves with the ship footage, as it has the key frame data, then using an illumination pass of the shot,

[CJCA915]

... create a tool that will do something similar to the echo effect in AE, but blend it seamlessly together... perhaps interpolating the footage between frames, to blend it together, I mean there has got to be a way to do this effect in a more practical manner, lol, outside shooting a real miniature...

[jamesgeraldroyal]

@CJCA915: "outside shooting a real miniature..." Well that hits the nail on the head. We're not trying to simulate an animation effect, but a photographic effect. Each frame of the warp streak is a long-duration exposure. So to get it right, we need to simulate how a motion picture camera works. What I did was render the footage, then add motion blur (shutter angle 365). I then exported the footage to an image sequence, imported the numbered images into AE and stacked & blended them.