Silicon Magic Art Gallery

BABYLON 5 CLONE 3D MODELS

This was my first, self-imposed modeling challenge in getting to know Lightwave 3D for the first time in late 1993, while working at my local FOX affiliate TV station, WSMH in Flint, MI. At that time, Lightwave ran only on a Commodore Amiga2000 based NewTek Video Toaster. This 640 x 480 JPEG image depicts the Vorlon Transport Class ship used by Ambassador Kosh as seen in the TV series Babylon 5. This object was made by close visual inspection of the original CGI ship from many video clips I collected and edited from the show. Well, actually the smaller Fighter Class version was my first model in LW, but this one uses it as the core so it still counts as the first.

So, naturally a few months later, after the success of the first model above, a second self-imposed challenge at something a little more detailed in terms of polygon count was calling me to model and render in LightWave. The result is depicted in this 640 x 480 JPEG image of the Centari-type JumpGate Generator as seen in the TV series Babylon 5. Similarily, this object was made by close visual inspection of many video clips from the show. The Starfury fighters coming out of it are not my models. Just one ship was rendered seperately and composited over the Jumpgate image four times at increasing sizes. Again, a first for me using the Commodore Amiga2000 based NewTek Video Toaster paint software.

Well, it kept nagging at me... "Model me! Model me!" and so I bit the big one and dove in creating the icon that started it all, the space station Babylon 5. No one had come even remotely close, so I felt it was my "duty" to "show 'em how it's done," making Lightwave shine as it vied for recognition in the ranks of programs like 3D Studio, SoftImage, and Wavefront. And don't forget, pushing the limits of 8 whopping megs of memory on the ol' Amiga2000, stuffing almost every byte of it with polygon and image texture map data while running a multitasking OS, a desktop video production application (the Video Toaster) and the Lightwave 3D rendering package. Them were the days! This 640 x 480 JPEG image depicts the Earth Alliance Space Station Babylon 5 as seen in the TV series by the same name. Again, I used dozens of video clips from the show to create all the meshes and image maps in roughly 150 hours over several months, finishing it at the end of 1995..

Organic modeling was just starting to hit the screen with ships like this one in 1995, and like B5, this Shadow Cruiser begged me to model it too. Not an easy task using LW 3.0, but if the big boy could do it (Ron Thorton, founder of Foundation Imaging, the production house that created ALL the effects shots for the first three years of the sci-fi TV series, Babylon 5), then so could I! Being the last B5 clone to date that I've made, it became the object of a tutorial I poroduced for the short-lived video magazine, Lightspeed, on how to model this spidery ship.

BABYLON 6

This is Dean A. Scott's concept of what the space station Babylon 5 of the sci-fi TV series Babylon 5 might have looked like if it were designed by the Minbari and Vorlon races. It's a hybrid organic, mechanical design that uses the ancient and still efficient centrifugal force (rotating sections) pricipal for generating artificial gravity in the living and work modules. The station is similar in length, being about 5 miles long. This design was modeled and rendered in Lightwave 6.0 and took about 3 weeks of spare time to complete. It was then submitted as a winning entry in an ametuer modeling contest sponsored by The Babylon 5 Modeler's Guild, an on-line consortium of fans using various 3D applications to create clones and unique 3D models and animations in the tradition of the B5 universe. Babylon 6 now graces the homepage of the newly redesigned B5MG website.

Click on the three images above to view their larger 800 x 600 images.