NX-01 Enter/Exit Warp Trail Effect

Chris2005

Anyone wouldn't happen to know how that effect was achieved?

I plan on doing some NX-01 animations in the future, and I've been trying to figure out how that effect was done for years now, with no luck.

count23

There are a few ways to pull it off. I'm not sure what was used by the actual production team.

Firstly and most easily, is to render the scene twice, once with the ship moving normally (your normal animation) and the 2nd time is to introduce a major amount of Blur on the same scene and render it seperately, then combine the two scenes afterwards using a difference filter.

The scene was done in lightwave, I screwed around with it about 6 years ago and was able to replicate a pretty similar effect using the above described method, granted it's probably inefficient but the unique warp blurringness comes down to how Lightwave 7.5 calculated it's motion blurs (they were very linear back then not really customizable).

hope that helps in some way, i'm wracking my brain trying to remember it, it was so long ago.

The 2nd method that I've used (more with my TNG ones) was to render out the colour scene normally, then render out an alpha of the warp and impulse engines. then i took those into After Effects and worked blur magic on them (Multiple masks using the alphas as a base).

nightfever

In After Effects there is an effect that locks quite similar to this. I don't remember the name of that effect and need to check out later.

Edit: Take a look at the CC Light Burst 2.5 effect.