Creating the Babylon 5 Parody Sequence (Patreon)

I'm full of impractical ideas. My latest was to take a simple section of the script, summarizing the Escherian Stairwell thesis paper, and present it as an elaborate spoof of the 90s sci-fi TV series Babylon 5 intro.

Why? Well, I happened to be binge re-watching the show. The endearing earnestness of the low-budget (by today's standards) production trying to tackle grand spectacles resonated with how the thesis paper felt to me - a deep, scholarly analysis of what is ultimately just a silly YouTube gag.

The original show used Lightwave as the animation software. My goal was to simulate the look in Blender. (And by simulate the look, I mean try to make it as real as possible, knowing that my mediocre 3D skills would automatically yield 1993-looking graphics.)

Creating the Assets

I needed a desert-y planet for the opening shot. Easy enough - a sphere, some procedural noise, done. The station itself was harder. I needed some sort of cross between B5 and an MC Escher drawing. I played around and through lots of trial & error ended up with a general shape.

I kept the detail level moderate, hoping texture maps would make it look a little richer.

I wasn't about to attempt something as iconic as the Starfuries though. Luckily, I didn't have to. The prolific Blender hard surface modeler Chris Kuhn has made one available under a Creative Commons license.

But his model actually looked *too* good. I spent some time reducing its detail and modifying the front to have a goofy display needed for my shot.

I also attached null objects to all the engines so I could place lens flares in those spots later in After Effects.

The jumpgate was an interesting challenge. I looked at some stills from the show and built a facsimile of one section.

I then used the array modifier to repeat it 5 times...

...and mirrored the structure to make the full gate.

Remembering an article about how the vortex was really modelled for the show and tried to recreate the technique. First I built a long hollow cylinder with many subdivisions.

To this I applied a procedural noise texture with a gentle transparency falloff at both ends. To twist the texture into a vortex, I twisted the actual mesh of the object.

This not only distorted the texture correctly, but also made it easy to animate by simply sliding its coordinates along the cylinder.

To build the command & control center window for the final shot, I took an actual frame from the season 1 intro and image-modeled my version over it, not paying too much attention to the fine details.

At this point time was running out so I really rushed through building random hull features further around the window just to have something there for the split second before the camera pushes in.

I came across an image claimed to be an actual sample of the patchy hull texture used in the show and just went to town, tiling it all over every model.

The texture controlled the color, gloss and bump of the surfaces. Combined with harsh, direct lighting and low raytracing settings, it really seemed to channel that old-school CG look.

Animation & Compositing

The motion was as basic as it gets, with objects and camera traveling in straight lines from point A to point B. For the opening shot, I threw in a couple of generic royalty free spaceships to depict the station construction.

The rendered scenes contained only the 3D objects with lighting.

Blender can export scene data directly to After Effects via a script, which makes it easy to composite other elements in 3D. This allowed me to place cards with starscapes (made using the technique described in last month's tutorial) as distant backgrounds that adhere to the camera motion.

Old-school, Lightwave-style lens flares (via Optical Flares plugin) and pages from the thesis were added the same way.

The scene data was especially useful for the Starfuries shot where, in addition to engine jets, I was able to perfectly line up comps containing the videos with the screens on the ships and mask them off using a separately rendered pass of the screen shapes.

I'm pleased with how the whole thing turned out. It's a fun way to convey some boring exposition.

And the number of YouTube comments recognizing the reference is much larger than I expected :)