Since the advent of television, people doing effects of any kind for
television have always had to innovate because of low budgets, little support
and short deadlines. Thus you get things like the “jar full of sparkles”
transporter effect in the oldschool Star Trek. To a certain extent, you have
to admire the folks who do effects for these shows, because they’re really
doing magic, getting -anything- out the door, even if it looks crappy.

This evening I briefly sat down to watch Discovery Channel, though, and saw
something that I couldn’t excuse. It’s a documentary called “Meteor Impact”
or some such and it’s about how now and then asteroids get close to the
earth.

Prevalent all throughout the show was this horrible, and I mean -truly- awful
animation of a big ugly grey shape flying towards a sphere with a bad picture
of the earth distorted onto it.

It was -really- bad. When the camera panned around the asteroid, you could
see that the texture had only been applied to one side, leaving a
checkerboard pattern on the opposite side where the texture was skewed. You
could see triangles clipping the camera (seeing -inside- the asteroid, like a
bad video game glitch) and the -earth-. Oh, I don’t even want to go into
it.

The funny thing is that both Lightwave and 3DStudio Max -come with- a demo
scene that has a well-lit earth with a lens flare and everything. Just what
you’d need if you were the producer’s 12 year old nephew and you were making
crap 3D stuff for his TV show.

I hereby -VOLUNTEER- to do any and all asteroid fly-by animations for
documentary purposes, so you don’t look like complete idiots, because it
would only take me a half hour to build and render more footage than you
could ever use. It’s about the simplest animation you could do, really. A
blob with a bump map texture on it animated along a path.

Here’s that Max Example scene I was talking about. There are even little
pixel stars in the background.