IGN has recently posted a developer dairy by Star Trek Online Visual Effects Lead (VFX) Artist Michael Cavallaro. The new diary talks about the visual design for Star Trek Online and what he and his team faced in developing the Star Trek universe. Given that the Star Trek Franchise stretches over forty years and 11 movies and incomposes visual styles from the low budgets on TOS in the 1960’s to J.J. Abrams slick high budget reboot of 2009 you can imagine the difficulties of fusing it all together into one style that pleased all the fans.
” The effects changed from series to series and from movie to movie, and of course you have the J.J. Abrams version, which is different than all of them. If there is one thing we learned from Abrams it is if you make it cool enough, the fans will like it. “ said Cavallaro ” The first step in visualizing an effect is to meet with the design team to see exactly what something does, when it’s used and how much damage it inflicts. From there we scour old episodes and movies to find all the reference for that particular effect. Sometimes we have several versions and sometimes it just doesn’t exist. In the case of different versions from different time periods, we try to find the most iconic one to build off of and give it a modern look. For new effects, we work closely with the Art Lead and Concept Team to make sure that what we are creating looks and feels like it is Star Trek IP. It’s kinda cool to think that a future Star Trek movie or TV show might use something we created as canon “
Judging from what I have seen so far Michael and his team have done a Great job the game looks better than I was anticipating when Star Trek Online was first announced. To read the full article go to Michael Cavallaro’s dev blog hosted on IGN.
