Celestia Forums

Hello everyone! My name is Mike Dempsey, and I'm the creator and Executive producer of a Star Trek fan film called "Star Trek: Origins". This fan film or independent film series is of course based on the original Star Trek television series. We are currently in late development and early pre-production of the first segement of the series and are considering ideas for the opening sequence for our project. By opening sequence, I mean the portion you're most familiar with "Space....the final frontier....." and all the cool planetary shots, flybys of the ship and so on.

I just recently became familiar with Celestia and when I realized it was possible to create video sequences with it, a light bulb appeared and I thought this might be a cool way to develop our opening sequence! My problem is I don't know how to do it (yet) and figured I'd visit the forum here to seek help from those of you who are "pros" at the program to see if anyone would be interested in developing the opening sequence for us?

If we select a sequence, that person will receive credit in each episode we do, copies of each episode and anything else we can come up with.

If you are interested, please email or PM me and I will provide you with the basic info for the project.

You can visit our website to check us out and learn more about us at http://www.startrekorigins.com -- I look forward to hearing from you!

Mike

With no shadows over models, I'm not sure Celestia fit your needs...

I'm not sure what's meant by that ElChristou, but I for one think it's a pretty neat idea.

If Celestia is used to create this scene, and if giving credit to just one person is the problem - then perhaps the credit (in general) should go to the "creators", those responsible for creating the software and data and models used. This is what?... a half-dozen or so of you?

The thing that sticks out most in my mind about this, would be the name of "Celestia" being there rather than some other - if you see my point. I think you creators should get together and collaborate on this before someone else takes the idea and runs with it!


Oh and hello and welcome to the forums Mr. Dempsey!

The problem is that 3D models in Celestia do not cast shadows, either on other objects or on themselves. Only Celestia's internal spherical objects cast shadows, also known as eclipses. Surfaces of 3D models which face away from a light source are darkened, but, by itself, that's not adequate for many purposes.

LordFerret wrote:I'm not sure what's meant by that ElChristou...

What he means is that Celestia does not cast shadows on models (or do reflections, etc), which means that it will probably not be able to deliver the sort of realism Mr. Dempsey requires (at least, not without a hell of a lot of post-production editing and tweaking).

EDIT: **Sneaky, Sneaky Selden** beat me to the post yet again:

<*cough*>Open RT</*cough*>

Open RT ( http://www.openrt.de ).

Rays light up life-like graphics ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6457951.stm ).

Spiff.

<*cough*>production deadline</*cough*>

<*cough*>shadowless celestia models, then</*cough*>

Spaceman Spiff wrote:<*cough*>Open RT</*cough*>

Open RT ( http://www.openrt.de ).

Rays light up life-like graphics ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6457951.stm ).

Spiff.

There are more practical methods for handling shadows cast by irregular objects than switching to ray tracing. I intend to use shadow mapping for this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mapping) in Celestia.

--Chris

Well I suppose if there's the will, there's a way. I just thought it would be really nice to see Celestia's name on such a thing.