To effectively map the textures over their CG spaceships' complex geometry, Santa Barbara Studios developed a variation of a fairly complicated technique that several effects firms are starting to employ, using what Grower calls "slide projectors." Instead of wrapping a "bearskin rug" of texture maps around their wireframe, they merely "project" the appropriate texture onto the part of the model that can be seen from a particular angle at a particular moment. "Imagine a spaceship with all of these slide projectors pointed at various parts of it, projecting high-resolution images which dissolve from one projector to the next where they overlap so we don't see any seams," Grower states. "That allows us to have infinite detail as we rotate around the ship, without all of the stretching problems that occur when we wrap a flat object around 3-D geometry. It was imperative for us to use this approach because of the multi-curved surfaces of the ships. Also, instead of having a texture for every nurb surface, which is what we did before — and there might be hundreds — this technique enabled us to simultaneously project onto several nurb surfaces. Instead of having a hundred textures, we had 30 or so, over which we'd add dozens of layers of different textures and 'effects maps' per ship to create highlights and other things, and then we'd render them with Renderman. It was very time-consuming to get the CG models to look right, because the filmmakers have been shooting [the Trek] models for a long time, and they knew exactly what type of look they wanted. They would make us revise the models until they were right, which was very difficult."
Insurrection takes place in a region of outer space called the Briar Patch, a giant nebula with immense glowing pillars filled with brilliant red and green areas. Nestled somewhere within this bizarre phenomena is the planet Ba'ku, where much of the film's action occurs. "The Briar Patch is misty, but with a harder edge, with towering shapes made of gaseous, cloudy material," Grower describes. "You could think of it as a cave the size of our area of the galaxy, although we only occasionally see some red glowy stars embedded in the 'walls', which are pretty thick, so the distances within it aren't so great that you could see a star field."
The Briar Patch was designed by Santa Barbara Studios' art director, Richard Kriegler, who had previously contributed to Robert Zemeckis's Contact. "He's one of the best matte painters in the world," Grower says. "To create the frilly 3-D edges of the Briar Patch 'cheese,' Richard mixed 30 to 40 matte paintings with a volume renderer/ shader we developed for Mental Ray. Although some of the matte paintings were multi-plane, he also used Alias/Wavefront Artisan to paint the ins and outs of his 2-D matte paintings onto 3-D geometry, which would actually deform over the geometry. We call it 21/2-D; when we canted or moved around within reason, we'd actually get three-dimensional parallax as the Enterprise and other ships traveled though."
One of the first views of the Briar Patch is seen when the Son'a Flagship emerges from a gaseous wall and heads towards the planet Ba'ku. "That was done with particles and software that we wrote called Blender," Grower recalls. "The Briar Patch actually interacts with the Flagship as pieces of it trail off the back. Because everything's CG, the ships and the environment work together."
Although Ba'ku is surrounded by red nebula clouds, the world is somewhat Earthlike in nature. "We couldn't have a weird atmospheric color on the planet's surface, because the filmmakers didn't want any process skies," Grower reveals. Nevertheless, Blue Sky/VIFX was enlisted to digitally art-direct the Ba'ku landscape. "It was supposed to be this mountainous region, so we had to reconstruct a lot of the plates the first unit shot out at Lake Sherwood in Westlake Village, [California]," says Blue Sky/VIFX visual effects supervisor Jim Rygiel, formerly of Boss Film. "We shot snowcapped mountains in Bishop and melded them in with these Lake Sherwood plates. Any time you see mountains on Ba'ku, it's all composite work."
Keeping Blue Sky/VIFX's 220 effects shots on course was the company's senior visual effects supervisor/president Richard Hollander, who counts 1979's Star Trek — The Motion Picture among his credits. "I'm the bad guy who looks at how everything's going according to costs, and makes sure that the quality is there," Hollander says with a smile. "On a fairly frequent basis, part of my role has been dealing with Paramount's representatives, director Jonathan Frakes, and producer Rick Berman, and making sure that everybody's happy on both sides."
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