A star is reborn.(broadcast)

Twenty-five years ago, the campy science-fiction series Battlestar Galactica was one of TV's shining stars, with bumpy-headed aliens and model-kit spacecraft that were typical of the era.

Since then, digital effects in film and television have be come far more sophisticated and realistic. Yet when producers recently brought this classic back to the small screen in a two-part miniseries for the Sci Fi Channel, they decided to pay homage to the original show by using state-of-the-art tools and techniques to replicate various effects from yesteryear.

"We had a lot to live up to," says Lee Stringer, CG supervisor at Zoic Studios (Los Angeles), which created the digital content for the four-hour miniseries. "We took hints from the original show and then took that a step or two further by adding another level of detail and realism."

In particular, the artists mimicked the look of the practical models/miniatures. To accomplish this, Stringer searched for retro model kits similar to those from the late-1970s to detail portions of the Battlestar Galactica spaceships. Using these practical model-kit parts for reference, the Zoic artists recreated the spacecraft in the computer using NewTek's LightWave content-creation software running on Pentium 4 Xeon PCs with Nvidia Quadro 4 graphics cards.

"I wanted the look to resemble what it was years ago," says Stringer, "but I didn't want the parts to fit perfectly." The audience may not have noticed these inconsistencies, but Stringer believes that, subconsciously, it helped remove the pristine CG edge from the 3D models. This was further accomplished by keeping the amount of hand-painted CG textures to a minimum, employing, instead, photographic textures applied with Adobe's Photoshop and ...