Subject: Re: Latest B5 episode
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 1996 17:18:38 -0800

>>>(1) When the Shadow ship lifted off from the hanger, how did they achieve 
> >>the effect of the glass pieces falling?

Simple way would have been to so some glass-pieces and key-framne them, or 
they could have used a physics-simulator.  Neat bit here: if you see it 
again, you can see one or more figures (wisely) getting the heck out of 
there around the time the glass comes down. :)

> >>(2) How were the electrical discharge effects created at the atmospheric 
> >>jumppoint?

Could have been done (maybe) with marble-texture or as an image sequence 
(ImageFX can create great-looking lightning, so should other software.  Of 
course, it could be a new texture/plug-in.

> >>Fantastic animation!
Yes, they keep doing great stuff- liked the design on the earth-ship ( 
front-end looked a bit like something from Aliens/Aliens3.

> >I've got another one for ya: Was the Minbari ship flying through 
>volumetric
> >clouds inside Jupiter's atmosphere? I didn't tape the episode and so 
>can't
> >go back for a closer look.

Best guess is an image sequence with some fractual noise on a plane thrown 
in.  For the part where the Shadow-ship emerges from a bank of clouds, there 
is a tutorial in LWPro (a few issues back) that shows how to do this with a 
logo, basically it involves cutting a cloud-image up and mapping the two 
parts on seperate objects, I think front-projection works its way in there 
too- its been a while since a read the issue.

Zoltan