PTherapist wrote on 2026-08-24, 10:14:
Trashbytes wrote on 2026-08-24, 08:48:
Kekkula wrote on 2026-08-24, 05:50:
I bought Babylon 5 season 1 and 2 dvds from thrift store. So past few evenings I've been back to 90's. My daughter walked by and asked what year they were made, and I bluntly stated late 90's early 2000... later at the end of the episode copy right noticed 1993 , so again I felt bit older 😢...
Now I just have to reach out Neil from rmc and ask if he knows what hardware was used to render 3d scenes 🤪
Lightwave 3D on Amigas was used.
This is true for the original pilot episode "The Gathering" (not on the Season 1 DVD set) and a lot of the space special effects used in Season 1.
From Season 2 onwards, they'd switched to faster PCs and workstation farms for rendering. The quality of the special effects from then on is noticeably better.
Yeah, this wasn't uncommon back then with how fast PC hardware was improving, but I doubt they redid all the 3d assets and scenes they reused from season 1, likely just imported them from LW3D for use with the PC render boxes.
http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/effects.html this site doesnt use HTTPS but it has a lot of interesting info about the setup.
Quoted from the site, for people who dont want to go to an unsecure connection.
From Adam "Mojo" Lebowitz, Foundation Imaging animator
The general composition of our FX shots, including camera moves, are dictated by the feeling of a scene. If JMS writes a big action scene, we'll move around a lot to convey that mood - if the scene has a somber tone, the moves will be slower to reflect this. Everything is dictated by story - a swooping camera move just for the sake of it can very easily draw your attention to the effect and away from the story - something we have no desire to do.
Interestingly enough, big swooping camera moves aren't something we can do very often for a good reason: you have no points of reference in space. Next time you're driving around, look at the clouds. using only them as reference, it seems as if you're standing still - even at 120 MPH! Now let's move into space, where your only reference are stars and planets - it doesn't matter how fast you move the camera, it's going to look as if you're standing still. In addition, without the background moving, if you move a camera past a ship it tends to look as if the ship is moving, which is why you will almost never see a shot of the camera moving past Babylon 5.
All this is why we tend to bank the camera a lot (twist it from side to side) - it's a way of adding camera motion to the scene without bothersome perspective problems!
From coproducer George Johnsen
Are Macintoshes used in the production?
Even though the Joe uses "another" platform, the show actually uses many! Macs have been essential to the creation of the show from the beginning. Even farther back, the Amiga and the Newtek Toaster were employed.
Currently we use Pentiums and Alphas for animation, Macs for Editing, Matte paintings and Compositing, and SGI's for Compositing and titling. If that isn't platform independent, I don't know what is!
The arsenal looks like the following-
Alphas for design stations serving 5 animators and one animation assistant (housekeeping and slate specialist). Most of these stations run Lightwave and a couple add Softimage. VERY plug-in hungry. PVR's on every station, with calibrated component NTSC (darn it, I hates ntsc) right beside.
P6's in quad enclosures for part of the renderstack, and Alphas for the rest, backed up 2x per day to an optical jukebox.
Completed shots output to a DDR post rendering and get integrated into the show.
Shots to composite go to the Macs running After Effects, or the SGI running Flint, depending on the type of comp being done, and then to the DDR (8 minutes capacity on the SGI).
Boy it sure sounds easy! The only problem is, we have a killer schedule and very picky producers, and ESPECIALLY picky viewers! 😀
It is, however, a bunch of fun!
