Home » Film & TV » Babylon 5 » The Special Effects

The Special Effects

© David Ye

all the objects are rendered nicely and there is no loss of fluidity in their movements - it was as though every object in the scene had a mind of their own and was not being controlled by the animators, it was just so realistic.

Some scenes are so complicated that you would probably need to see it several times just to pick out what is going on (one could find it hard to imagine how much work the animators put into their special effects let alone achieving that level of complexity).

But the animators are not without help, since rendering such complex sequences can take 10 to 15 minutes on a Pentium PC running windows NT with Lightwave 3d to render just one frame. It's no wonder the producers has pressed about 100 PC's into service, just for the actual rendering work. With nearly four years of digital experience behind them the CGI team at Babylon 5 can only propel the frontiers of computer animation even further forward with even more stunning effects.

Finally, the people at Newtek has done a fabulous job in creating such a powerful and easy to use program. These stunning special effects could not be created without it. So thanks to the success of Babylon 5. It has now been adopted by many other television programs and is also used in movies. Such good examples are Star Trek - Voyager, Deep Space Nine, Seaquest DSV, The adventures of Hercules and many others.

You can find out more about what goes on behind the scenes on Babylon 5 by visiting the The Macuser Live Shot Babylon 5 web site and the Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5.