DarenDoc’s Slightly Nifty Musings Inc.

I’ll be at Wondercon the first weekend of April doing some fun panels… here is a preview:

FRIDAY

2:30-3:30 Geek Café: State of the Genre Report— Join our panel of experts as they examine the state of science fiction, fantasy and horror in film and TV from the living ever longer and prospering Star Trek franchise to Star Wars to what the success of Avatar means for the future of movies. Join Robert Meyer Burnett (Free Enterprise, The Hills Run Red), Daren Dochterman (conceptual illustrator, Iron Man 2, Master & Commander), Steve Kriozere(Dead & Deader, NCIS), and Steve Melching (The Clone Wars, The Batman) for this freewheeling conversation about the state of sci-fi movies and TV today. Room 220

SATURDAY

3:00-4:00 Galaxy Quest: A 23rd “Anniversary” Galactic Celebration: Never Give Up, Never Surrender!— It’s been 23 years since the best sci-fi TV series of the 80s, Galaxy Quest,first debuted on television, and now our panel of Questsperts discuss their favorite episodes, whatever happened to the cast, and the future for the franchise. Although the series has been dormant for two decades (despite some bad JN/AD slash fiction and old VHS and laserdiscs), there’s always hope for the future. Never give up, never surrender! Featuring Robert Meyer Burnett (Free Enterprise), Daren Dochterman (VFX, ST: TMP Director’s Cut), and Steve Melching (The Clone Wars, Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot). Room 220

SUNDAY

3:30-5:00 Starship Smackdown XIV: Captains’ Courageous Edition— The must-see panel of WonderCon and Comic-Con International returns for another action-packed year as the greatest spaceships in the history of the universe and this or any other dimension compete for the highly-coveted Smackdown title. Will the Enterprise once again defeat an Imperial Star Destroyer? Can the Serenity make mincemeat out of the Battlestar Galactica? And what exactly is the Captain’s Courageous lightning round anyway? Our panel of expert spaceshipologists vying to outwit, outplay, and outphaser includes Robert Meyer Burnett (Free Enterprise, Hills Run Red), Daren Dochterman (conceptual artist, X2, Iron Man 2), Steve Melching (The Clone Wars, Transformers), and special surprise guests. End your weekend the San Diego way with a REAL San Francisco treat! Room 103

Yeah, I’m looking forward to this… should be a lot of fun.  I’m especially excited to be able to do the Galaxy Quest panel, since the powers that be won’t allow any “unauthorized” Star Trek panels, our “Is Star Trek Dead” fan favorite panel is no more…

So now we can concentrate on our OTHER favorite genre show…

Hope to see you there.

Ok, here goes.  After a bunch of you contacted me to learn about texturing in 3d, I decided to try my hand at producing a tutorial about that.  It’s sometimes random and unfocused… but it’s a start.  Hopefully, I’ll do more of these if you like where this one is going.  Part one is above.  Part two below.

After all this chat about TMP, I wanted to integrate that into my “modo-izing” of older model files…

so I present a preview of what’s coming up.

I am still in the process of going through old files, and I decided to try and bring in my Poseidon model to Modo and see what I could get out of it.  Modo handles Lightwave objects fairly well, with only a small hassle sometimes of textures not making the transition intact… or once converted, mild adjustments to the settings are needed to give the same result.  So, when I brought the 225,000 polygon (small count for its relative detail) model over, I was expecting a bit of work still yet to be done.  Well, it came across pretty clean, and I only needed to tweak the luminance of some of the textures, and did some test renders of the old girl.

So, here’s something for the folks who were asking for more Poseidon…

Oh, the video above was not made during the Production, but afterwards… when I wanted to have something to put on my portfolio… thought it needed a nice beauty shot.  And, one last sidenote, I believe that in the Guinness’ book of world records for 2007, there is an entry for “largest CG model used in a film”… or something like that.  The winner was ILM’s model of this Poseidon… with a poly count of tens of millions.  But, the funny thing is, for the photo used in the story, they used one of my illustrations.  Makes me grin.

Click to Embiggen

Click to Embiggen

Click to Embiggen

An early attempt at integrating the augmented key art, the New Title logo, and a tag line...

Believe it or not, it’s been nearly 10 years since we got the greenlight to work on the Director’s Edition of Star Trek: The Motion Picture with the great Robert Wise.  For Producer Dave Fein, Restoration Supervisor Mike Matessino, and myself, it had already been 8 months of prep and dealings with the studio to get the project approved.  For those of you who haven’t gone through my personal website at www.darendoc.com, I invite you to take a look at this page I put up that gives you a little taste of what went on…

TMP:DE