Community: Contests: Archive: 2002 SOTM Archive: January

January

Under Fire Terry Keller January, 2002

Terry writes about his model:

This scene depicts an X-Wing barrelling down a Deathstar trench, with a narrow miss from Tie blaster fire overhead.

The X-Wing is a few years old. It has over 1,200 pieces and is built entirely with pre-Lego Star Wars pieces. Features include wings that crank open and closed via an overly comlex gear and chain arrangement prone to breakage, removable R-2 unit, opening storage bay, pilot over-the-shoulder targeting site, and retractable landing gear. Although I sinned with the main gear and built it into the body, not the engine pods.
This model was also featured at the July 2000 Legoland Kidvention LDraw Exhibit.

Having a complete custom X-Wing model, I decided to do a scene with a trench. The trench is a virtual construction using LDraw pieces, but is not actually buildable. I simply used a lot of different pieces to construct the two walls and the floor. In fact, the entire trench is about ten times longer than what is currently visible, and is slightly curved. I greatly overestimated how much trench was needed. :-/

To make things a little easier, I fudged the scale. The trench is 1:1, but the X-Wing is 1/4 size. This made making the trench much easier, since it only had to be 1/4 the size. A neat trick when the trench is blurred, as it is not too noticeable.

The blurring effect was achieved by using POV-Ray's animation and clock functions. The trench was moved slightly backward over the course of 100 renders, then all 100 frames were merged into one image using TGA averager by Warp. The background starfield was generated using Chris Colefax's Galaxy include.

The Tie blaster fire are actually LDraw pieces as well. Two Bar 4L Light Sabre Blades were enlarged and stretched to the right size. Postprocessing using Paint Shop Pro added the glow effect, a multi-step process well worth learning.

Lighting is primarily from one strong, distant source. I wanted the effect of strong shadows to simulate the local sun. A little fill light was added only to bring out detail.

A website with more details and photos may eventually get done.
pRocrAsTiNatIon RuLEs!