Babylon 5 - The Lost Tales - DVD - Atmosphere VFX
In the Autumn (Fall) of 2006 I was asked to construct a brand new version of the Babylon 5 Station for an upcoming straight to DVD release for the Babylon 5 franchise.
The guys at Atmosphere had a heck of a job to do - they had to rebuild a huge amount of ships and sets for this DVD as it was to be dragged screaming into the present digital age - to fully take advantage of new technology and techniques developed since the days of the original series. They pretty much left me alone to develop and conceptualise the new station with its many new areas of detailing. At every step of the process I presented them with variants of each section re: detailing - they chose and I developed and refined. They had a lot on the plate and I wasn't going to let them down either.
Besides - Babylon 5 was what started it all for me in this business and to be asked to build this Iconic station was a privilege - truth be told and pretty much the icing on the cake so far in my modelling career- Not to mention getting my first end of feature credit too!
Below you will find high resolution renders of the station then followed by some shots from the DVD footage itself - kindly provided by Alec McClymont of Atmosphere VFX. Ron Thornton has scrutinized renders of the model and given it his thumbs up! (Which is cool!) and students at Dave School have been provided renders to study as part of their course work..
Sadly though the franchise is not going to continue - so fans are not going to get the chance to see the new station in future - so maybe this page can show them some of the detail that went into it that was not immediately apparent from it's fleeting appearances in the DVD.
The station took 3 months to build from scratch - nearly all of it purely polygonal detail - except crucially for the detailing of the rotating section -for that I specially created very high res bump maps - they themselves took a week to model render and prepare - I sincerely hope you enjoy looking at the result as much as I did making it - cheers! Oh - I also provided a host of my own B5 models made over the years and they have featured in the DVD now becoming canon ships in their own right - pretty cool
BABYLON 5 - RE-IMAGINED!!
Here are high res renders of the finished model - N.B I wasn't contracted to do a light rig for the station - that was handled by AlecM.
Shots from the DVD Featuring the Station. - all images copyright WB/ Atmosphere VFX - provided by AlecM - cheers buddy!
