Star Trek - Lens flare porn

If JJ Abrams's Trek film is anything to go by, our future is blindingly shiny.

I'm glad to say that this latest Star Trek reboot is, in many ways, superior than its predecessors. It had a good plot, a great cast (Simon Pegg was funny as hell, by the way), exciting space battles, fantastic visual effects and to top it all up, it features an orgy of anamorphic lens flare!

lens flare!


more lens flare!


lens flare on the bridge!


...and of course, on the title too!

Bear in mind these screenshots were taken from the trailer only. If you watched it carefully, you'll see that almost every shot had a lens flare in it.

Apparently, JJ Abrams opted for a shooting style that calls for a spotlight to be pointed at the camera whenever possible, and ILM was only too glad to obliged with an arsenal of new tools to simulate realistic lens flare in their VFX shots. You know...like Transformers, only more.

As a fellow CG artist, let me say that the CGI lens flares were very well done. I simply found it ironic and amusing that so much effort went into developing an effect that the CGI community once denounced as a hallmark of amateur work.

Lens flare is back in style, people !

Star Wars - Class A Container

If you have played games since the early 90s, you'd probably have heard of the Star Wars X-wing series of games by LucasArts. One of the most prominent props in those game was this squarish, uninteresting 6 polygon prop known simply as a container.

screenie from the X-wing Alliance game.

Nonetheless, I spent so much game time blowing up these unremarkable yet surprisingly resilient boxes they became lodged in my memory, and with time became an inexplicable urge to model the damn thing.

Obviously this is just my own intepretation. Didn't take too long to make it, but it was a fun, if not nostalgia-filled, way to utilize my downtime.