Battlestar Galactica TV Series -- In house VFX Department
When you make a model for a Film or TV show, in an ideal world several versions would be made: A hero model with lots of detail for occupying most of the frame and for close ups. A medium detail model for medium distance shots and a low detail model that incurs very little processing overhead for filling background fleet shots.
Many times though when a show Like Galactica is initially produced - especially a show that requires modelling of an Entire fleet of vehicles - the ancillary vehicles rarely get the privilege of having these extra versions created; due mainly to time and budget constraints etc..
As production of the show continues, then some meshes that are more commonly used eventually get treated to the extra versions they have until then been lacking - and it was in Summer 2006 that Meshweaver was contracted to create these additional model versions and clean up and optimise the Hero versions if possible at the same time. Meshweaver has earned a reputation for efficient creation of these LOD (Level Of Detail) models - and the results are shown below.
Space Passenger Liner
The first ship that got the cleanup and extra versions was the Interplanetary Space Liner. Three versions of this ship needed to be done as there were three distinct repeating liveries on the show - the SAG (Sagittarian Spaceways), the PANGAL (Pan Galactic) and the standard Generic Liner. Each of these were created afresh, derived from one Generic optimised hero mesh. A medium detail version was then made and finally a low polygon model was created. Low polygon models often involve the most work ironically, as they have to be UV mapped everywhere and adorned with realistic textures to mimic their fully detailed siblings. - They end up like a well detailed Game model when completed. The texturing was also tweaked and adjusted as per production suggestions.
The Producers also wanted weathered dirty versions of each variant - so below is a look at the different versions and also the resultant dirty up jobs undertaken also. Altogether - with other versions like Black with just luminous attributes for specific render passes - a total of 18 meshes were created along with import scene files derived from a single original mesh.
PROMETHEUS
The Prometheus made its first appearance in the Season 2 episode "Black Market". The original Artist made a nicely detailed hero model for that episode and it served it purpose excellently. As time went on though the VFX staff wanted to include it in more fresh fleet shots and this called for an optimised version and the other LOD versions as putting the unadulterated Hero mesh in fleet filler shots was proving too prohibitive when it came to CPU overheads. As before the Hero mesh was optimised from the original 1.8 Million polygons down to approx 1.3 or so..and then a Medium detailed version was created. The low detail version once more proved to be the most work as it still had to look like the original and there was a lot of industrial detailing inside this ship that needed to be emulated.
Altogether - from 1 single mesh - 12 variants were made in total with special versions for specific render passes for compositing
MINERAL MINING SHIP
As well as being created right from the outset of the mini series - a more detailed version of this mesh was revised for the Season 2, Ep 15: Scar. As with the two models above the same treatment was applied and the results can be viewed below.
