by Ron Magid
The ninth entry in Paramount Pictures' ongoing, effects-heavy, Star Trek feature-film franchise, Insurrection is the third to star the cast of the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation (along with several crew members from sister series Deep Space Nine). This time out, the lion's share of the visual effects chores were assigned to Blue Sky/VIFX (Alien: Resurrection and The X-Files, covered in AC Nov. 1997 and July '98, respectively) and Santa Barbara Studios (Spawn, 500 Nations).
Santa Barbara Studios handled over 100 space effects, which meant taking some of the ships in the Trek universe entirely into the CG realm for the first time. (Industrial Light & Magic mixed and matched physical and CG models on the two previous films; see AC Dec. '96 and April '95.) Meanwhile, for scenes set on the alien world of Ba'ku, Blue Sky/VIFX oversaw some 200-plus shots, which include phaser fire, facial and character animation, and creating vast CG landscapes. The company also created CGI models for Son'a's mechanical drones and spacecraft — shuttles, the Solar Collector, and a holographic ship. The Blue Sky/VIFX team also collaborated with John Eaves of the Paramount art department on the holoship design, using his concept illustration as a guide for designing and constructing a 3-D maquette that was scanned and used as a starting point for conceiving a 3-D ship model.
In a supporting role, Pacific Ocean Post, veterans of the various Trek TV series, handled additional effects work, including transporter beam-ins and beam-outs.
Santa Barbara Studios is no stranger to the Trek universe either, having created the main title sequences for both the Voyager and Deep Space Nine series, as well as the spectacular stellar cartography-room sequence for Star Trek: Generations. To complete their contributions to the latest Trek feature on schedule, however, Santa Barbara marshaled 25 artists under founder/visual effects supervisor John Grower. "This was the first time the filmmakers had contemplated creating the spaceships entirely with CG," Grower explains. "In addition to the Enterprise, we're showing a first look at the Captain's Yacht, which fits in the underside of the Enterprise's saucer section. Plus, there's a new Federation Shuttle, a new Federation Scout Ship, and the alien Son'a ships. These new craft had to be designed by John Eaves and then approved, which happened during principal photography."
The only Federation spacecraft that previously existed as a CG model was the Enterprise, created by ILM for Star Trek: First Contact. "ILM actually released their Enterprise database to us, which was very nice of them," Grower says appreciatively. "It was very helpful in the beginning, because we had all these animatics to create. However, their Enterprise was a fairly low-resolution model, and while we originally thought, 'Maybe we can just add to this database,' that process became more trouble than it was worth, so we had Viewpoint Data Labs come down and actually redigitize the Enterprise using the original miniature."
As ILM had done on Star Trek: First Contact, Santa Barbara Studios' artists applied photographic textures from the original miniature to their CG Enterprise. Grower recalls, "We shot about 50 21/4" negs of the model, then pieced them all back together on the computer and applied them to this giant wireframe of the ship. We then painted out the seams and parts that didn't match colorwise."
As for the other Federation and Son'a ships, Paramount's Art Department delivered fairly simple drawings to Santa Barbara Studios, whose modelers then had to interpret John Eaves' 2-D designs in 3-D cyberspace. "John sent us elevation views and one or two 3/4 perspective drawings of each ship, but we had to do a lot of deduction work," Grower says. "The Son'a Flagship and Battleships had very complex shapes and all of these incredible compound curves, which didn't appear in the plan views. They're thin in one dimension and very wide and long in the other, kind of like a trilobite. The biggest challenge was that the Son'a ships didn't look the same from one angle to the next, so if we rotated around them a little bit, their profile changed because they had hundreds of compound curves that hooked together to form their shape. Getting it all to flow involved a ton of work and a very long modeling process."
For all of these reasons, Grower and company decided to model the Federation and alien spacecraft using Alias/Wavefront's new Maya software. "Each ship was made up of lots of nurb surfaces, and the databases were hundreds of megabytes per ship," Grower explains. "These models were very heavy, but Maya allowed us to efficiently structure and organize the data. We went through several iterations [of the ship designs] before we got approval, and Maya helped a lot there as well. Once we got the ships approved, of course, we had to make them look real."
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