Hello, as an extra little suprise I decided to upload this snippet of the Jabba scene completely removed and replaced with an iris transition that matches the style of the original optical versions.
I also updated the oriignal post for more information and updated changelist.
Heres the “final” version of the entire Mos Eisley sequence with temp audio, as I simply didn’t have the skill to refine the drive-by scene. The main things in this are:
-The recut entrance scene which was a page taken straight out of Adywan’s Revisited edition
-Redone matte with the correct time-of-day outside of the cantina to maintain accuracy
(although the all of the outdoor scenes are inconsistent in the film, lol)
https://vimeo.com/628306487
I’ll eventually later on work on that drive-by scene for a future hypothetical V2 of this edit so until I get a better computer and learn how to do camera projection in Blender, it will be shelved for now.
To add some extra workload to my schedule for the benefit of this edit, I will be adding Yavin in the background of the battle scenes and will be basing this straight off of Adywan’s version to more effeciently do this.
EDIT: I realized that I uploaded the wrong file to Vimeo, but in the edit, the SE aerial shot of the speeder driving off after the mind-track scene is included.
The explosion element looks interesting however one of the explosions isnt centered on the planet itself.
Also the explosion feels too plastered and in-static, try adding more dynamic stuff
I realized after posting that the laser beam looked janky and weird. I soon fixed that and made it thinner, similar to how Adywan did about this shot.
If anybody wants to use the Alderaan shot, shoot me a PM and make sure to give credit.
Speaking of Adywan, I will be implementing certain changes from his Revisited Edition sometime soon.
After a trillion years, I finally finished the Alderaan Explosion sequence to a degree in which I find acceptable. The colors are a bit overexposed but at this point I’m too tired to keep on going (lol)
I adjusted the size of the explosions a bit to fit in more in-frame and fixed the little jitteriness at the start. If you may find it a bit lacking in quality, its WAY better in HD.
https://streamable.com/ut567t
Aside from this one, I decided to make two changes:
1.) I have decided to not do the speeder shadow removal + replacement because my current skills in editing isnt good enough to do that sort of thing, plus I can barely run any 3D rendering program such as Blender on this computer.
2.) I removed the Jabba confrontation scene in the SE completely using an iris wipe transition carefully masked to hide the transition from ILM, I’ll be posting that soon along with others.
As of right now the edit is heading its way into completion, however if I were to make a hypothetical V2, It would mainly tackle on the speeder shadow replacement + fixing the jump-cuts using fantamorph.
EDIT: Updated first post to update some sources and add these changes in
Hey there, It’s been three months since I’ve last given an update in regards to this project. I have been very busy with many things in my life and just very recently I had the time to keep working on this.
And yes, its another Alderaan explosion test.
It doesn’t stray too far from the last one, but my main gripe is that it looks very low-quality + some of the explosions are in a different framerate which makes them look stuttery and weird. This is mainly due to the source material I have, which is the ArtBeats explosion pack which is also used by Adywan on his Revisited editions.
This leaves me to two options: Either A.) Redo some of the explosion material to make them more HQ/replace some footage or B.) Have it AI upscaled to match the quality. If anyone can lend their computer to upscale this explosion, I will be more than thankful.
(This is also the first time I composited in the green laser, which slightly looks off even though its the original one I rotoscoped in. It may be because of how weird the original laser was aniamted which gives it that stuttery look. I don’t know how to fix it, but for some reason it looked really good in both the SE versions and Adywan’s version, so if anyone has suggestions, please let me know!)
I’d like to ask for a copy of this, if not just a sample of it.
I think a better way to make the mouth move with the lines well is through the use of AI software that does lip-sync style outputs (kind-of like Deepfakes but using a single image and you can change what the person can say, i.e WOMBO.AI which is on the App Store, but I’m sure theres PC alternatives)
Hi, please refer to the “Star Wars Preservation” section of this forum for your inquiry as this is the wrong place to ask. You can also refer to the Star Wars Despecialized thread itself and see if there are posts with similar issues, if not you can just simply reply your problems: https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Harmys-STAR-WARS-Despecialized-Edition-HD-V2-7-MKV-Released/id/12713/page/678#1435535
Another one for today: I recut the Mos Eisley opening sequence along with adding a soundtrack (that I borrowed straight out of Revisited) thats uses neither of the overly loud theatrical version or the one with the SE since it gives me traumatic flashbacks of the CGI Jawa antics (lol)
I ended up not using the new wide shot of Mos Eisley with the SE buildings since it was too short and didnt really do much but break the pace of the scene. I’m pretty pleased with the final result, albeit the SFX isnt completely there yet.
Well, I did this Death Star explosion based off the theatrical version, but I couldn’t get to match the two Death Stars so I’ll fix that in the future:
Hello, unfortunately the VFX shots won’t be finished for a long time as have I more obligations and stuff in my personal life, so I guess we should move that to a V3 of TROS:A.
Also, one more thing. Has any one found the original matte painting for Tatooine that they used in ROTJ?
Heres another test render, but this time of Tatooine. The atmosphere and planet textures are something left to be desired with and I’ll definitely fix it. Unfortunately the final shot won’t contain the ANH matte because I cannot for the life of me figure out how to meticulously recreate the matte painting in 3D space down to the cloud swirl pattern and ground colors.
Well, the VFX I’m doing should probably be consistent to how ILM is doing with the shots (in which they are mainly going for a realistic look, yet exaggerated to add more stylistic features) and viewing the Falcon shots in TROS, the only indication for a sun in space are sun rays (it’s impossible realistically but it works stylistically in the film which I’ll implement) and lens flares.
The only time we see a sun in the film is during the lightspeed skipping sequence, but its brightness levels are similar to a sunset and it’s really not as bright.
Besides, the suns will be in the shot (Falcon taking off from Homestead) preceding this final shot so we’ll still get that “suns in horizon” in the film.
Also this might take me 2 weeks to a month of work to finish these two shots because my computer is an extremely slow machine haha
I feel like it’s really difficult to realistically portray suns in CG, as there are too many factors to go along with it.
If we are talking from a realistic standpoint, those two suns would both be extremely white (or atleast one of them would be very slightly red) without the atmosphere due to lack of Rayleigh scattering (this is the reason why the sky is blue; the sun hits the atmosphere and in turn blue light is scattered more in the spectrum and the sun looks slightly yellow or red from the lack of the blue light.)
Also you have to consider the anamorphic lens flare, how bright you want the suns to be? (I presume they are in the Goldilocks region in which the sun is not too close, nor too far which can inhabit life so they’d be pretty bright if you point a camera at it) and the way it looks overall in terms of volumetric lighting and many, many factors which are insanely hard to pull off. Besides, the two suns are insanely close to each other that when viewed from space theyd look like a single giant light source.
For reference, here is how the sun actually looks like in space:
This is one of the reasons why you don’t actually see the sun nor the light source in Star Wars, since its very difficult to pull off. These shots were planned to avoid the light source to be shown.
However, I am thinking of planning two shots, mainly the first shot showing the Falcon leaving the homestead with the suns slowly rising up in the sky (as it has been stated here that this scene takes place at dawn) and the second of the planet to simply leave the Tatooine horizon and jump into hyperspace which then iris wipes to the credits.
Heres a mockup showing the Tatooine matte painting from ANH into the last shot of the Falcon leaving Tatooine. This is just a thing I mocked up in Photoshop and is not an actual 3D render, although the Falcon is the only 3D thing in that shot.
I attempted to give it that overly-teal look the color grading for TROS had, and added a lens flare which is JJ’s signature look.
It was supposed to jump into hyperspace at the final frames, but the animation looked extremely weird and I couldn’t get that hyperjump trail that poppasketti did.
Put together a little concept for you’re Falcon ending idea.
I think it’d look really good if it flew over briefly instead of instantly jumping to light speed would be such a great ending calling directly back to the first ever Star Wars scene
What software did you use for this?
Yea, for “I’m a Jedi” just give it a slight pause in between those words.
It was supposed to jump into hyperspace at the final frames, but the animation looked extremely weird and I couldn’t get that hyperjump trail that poppasketti did.
For reference, this is how the shot looks without compression
(I added way too much film grain so it looks noisy)
Speaking of extending the ending of TROS, heres a test shot of the Falcon moving across space trying to match the look and lighting of TROS. Unfortunately, Streamable has decided to clip the dark and light values again making it look more contrasty than it should.
I might extend the final shot down to two shots: The Falcon flying off from the homestead, and another showing it flying away from the planet itself into hyperspace, for more adventures to come.
This might give extra room for the score and to keep the pace relatively smoother and not make it feel too much of a rushed ending.
(I might need help finding some footage of dusk sunsets on a pretty flat-looking desert)
Also, I’m pretty sure the Tatooine suns would be in the horizon of the homestead during sunset as shown in ANH.
I pretty much got the model untouched from Sketchfab but I removed the landing legs. I’m still a novice to Blender so I don’t really know how to make textures, models and stuff.
At the end, anything that looks weird will always be hidden in motion. A good motion blur + match grain from the original Blu-ray would hide any “over-perfections”
I’m also trying not to make it look as real as possible, just trying to line it up with the visual aesthetic of the film. TROS isn’t too overly-photorealistic with its VFX (and they probably didn’t care nor have the time to finish it due to the rushed nature of production) and so anything floats under the sun.
I attempted to recreate the lighting of the Falcon in TROS using Blender 2.92, it somewhat looks more like a miniature than a CG ship. I’m planning on probably fixing the last shot wherein it will fly away from Tatooine, but instead of the sunset, it would go straight into hyperspace from space.
