Andrew Concornan asked me about the opening sequence of Star Trek : Deep Space 9, where you see Spocks face in the dust cloud off the comet. I will answer this question later tonight. If you have a question, just drop it below.....

Okay, well basicly this is called "displacement mapping". You have these nifty things called "particle systems" which make a 3D animators life easier. If you have 200 fish in a 3D scene, the animator doesn't want to go and animate every single one of those 200 fish, so instead you use a particle system. Without going into too much detail, particle systems take one object, and make many copies of it, and perhaps change the new copy each time to make it different. If you have an asteroid belt, you can make just one rock, and use a particle system to make 1000 copies of it and give each one a different size, colour, trajectory and rotation.

In the case of DS9, they used a particle system to make the dust off the comet. This would have been one heck of a particle system, with perhaps 1 million particles or more. Then, inside that particle system, they would have created another particle system, with the same type of particles, except these ones had thier position controlled by an image.
The image would be a grayscale image of Spocks face. Because the image was 2D, you could only make it out from one angle. The particle system would use the same principle and make dust that would reveal the image from only one angle.
So hey presto, you have spocks face coming out of the cloud for that one instant, when the camera moves to the right viewing angle. It sounds simple, it's not, it is REALLY hard. This would have taken a long time to do....

All that effort to hide a face that only about 2% of viewers have spotted so far?

The creators must have had a LOT of time on their hands whilst creating the opening titles!

Still it's great to see that after 7 years of DS9 the type of technology used in that comet dust segment is still gawped upon today. Well done, creators! ;-)

Here - here to that, it is still something that can be learnt from!
Declan

Just to follow up on that....

ILM (the visual effects masters) actually had to write specialised software to handle the "face showing in dust" sequences for "The Mummy". Which is funny becuase it shows they havent done anyhing like that before for film. They did the ST:DS9 sequence, but that wasn't too hard becuase TV is 1/8th cinema resolution.

How is the Bajorian wormhole done. I think it is some sort of Puddle with shockwaves and a light shining through it, but no one else thinks so.

More than likely an atmospheric effect, created entirely by the computer. It still would have taken a long time to do for the SFX guys.

I think the really cool thing about this series is that it has really tested the water when it comes to Visual Effects. I have seen all sort of new things being tried for the first time (with varying levels of sucess). The best I've seen is probably some of the recent attack scenes in the Seventh season. The worst is a shot I saw of a CG warbird which was obviously just a basic model with a warbird picture textured onto it, yuck. The Valiant was pretty bad too for some of the shots

I've been trying to find independent verification of the DS9 dust cloud images for years! I'm pretty sure I was the first one to discover it (at least as noted in the Nitpicker's Guild) way back about the third season. If you look closely and use your freeze frame, you can also see Uhura sitting at her console.

I never thought it would be that hard from a programming standpoint. Just take an image, fuzz it, and use a "dispel" program to make the bits fly apart. Record that, run it backwards, and the bits coalesce for that fraction of a second into the original image.

I wrote a detailed description of the images I could find in the cloud at some other point on this or the old board. A search may turn it up, or maybe I could repeat it if needed.

In all the time I've watched DS9 I never once saw or ever heard of Spock's face being shown in the comet's tail. Whenever it's shown again I'll have to try to remember to watch for it. How did anyone find out about it? Was it leaked out or what?

That was something I noticed while daydreaming during the credits. I was watching a taped episode, and had just been doing something with Star Trek Cards. An image flashed by that made me go "Wha?" -- it looked a lot like an image on one of the cards. So I freeze-framed the sequence and stepped through it and saw Spock. Logic dictated that Kirk should be there too (and he is, right before that, but VERY difficult to see). Uhura jumped out at me a few months later, much in the same way Spock did.

I have looked and looked and looked but can't find Spock. Is it a profile shot? How much of the screen does he take up? Can you make out the ears?

Al, I'd like you to put up a description of where the faces appear again. My brother & I went through the whole sequence frame by frame and still didn't spot them.

Chris: get your tape, and wait until the instant leading edge of the comet touches the right edge of your screen. Pause the tape at exactly that moment, and Spock's face will be on the far left part of the screen, a three-quarter profile facing right.

I notice the comet touches the right screen twice - first after it sweeps past the screen, then as the whole picture pans back, the grey meteor bit touches the right of the screen again. Which is it?

The post-sweep bit, the first time the comet touches the right of the screen.

The top of Spock's head is at the top of the screen, and the tip of his chin is about a third from the bottom.

It's a bit abstract -- it took me until just a few weeks ago to see it. I still can't see it if I just let the tape run without pausing it.

DSP really improved upon the "Badlands" special effects seen in the Voyager pilot (Caretaker). Voyager's Badlands were represented by some cartoonish 'twisters' . DSP improved it by digitally twisting real flames into some neat twisters. Sometimes manipulation of real objects can work better than pure CGI.

DSP did feature the most spectacular spacebattles out of all the Trek series. ST:TNG featured simplistic ones, and many of Voyagers were just plain unmemorable.

Of course, in the early nineties morphing effects were especially popular after Terminator II. Odos transformations filled the bill for the Trekkie morphing fans. Some of the morphs I found more memorable: changing into a spinning top and becoming a liquid to merge with the shapeshifters' "sea".

For pure nostalgic value, the ep which combined the DS9 crew with the Trek classic crew (from The Trouble With Tribbles) was tremendous. The new models for the Enterprise and the Space Station looked great in moodier lighting and crisp detail (especially the spinning lights on the Enterprise nauceles).

Now that I've heard about the spock face, I can usually spot 3 or 4 of them in the opening credits.