Welcome To Timothy Fox's
Special Effects Web Site
My new Star Trek tricorder hand prop.
You are visitor 
to my website since March 29th, 1997
Hello special effects fans and welcome to my website! My name is Tim Fox and my website is dedicated to the miniature, computer graphics, animation, photographic and composite special effects work that I've been doing over about the last eleven years. My special effects work, which I'll show you how to do, is mostly a mixture of Star Trek and Star Wars projects that include various studio and location shoots, model creation, still photography, general and special purpose image processing and compositing, and specialized 2D and 3D computer graphics animation programs.
I also enjoy collecting special effects books and magazines, as well as very high quality copies of movie and TV hand props. I've also visited both the Star Trek and Star Wars exhibits at the Air & Space Museum in Washington D.C., and I have assembled an extensive series of pictures that document my visits there. I hope you enjoy my work, and please let me know what you think!
Current Projects:
I'm currently in the process of creating an exact 6 foot replica of the original 8.5 foot model of the Imperial Star Destroyer built for The Empire Strikes Back. My model contains three mount points, 6,500 neon lit fiber optic windows, two fully lit landing bays and seven lit engines. At the moment, I'm drafting out several dozen pieces of the upper building structure and landing bay areas of the model onto wood. Once all the pieces are drafted out, I'll cut them out and see what the upper building structure of the model looks like.
Suggested Background Knowledge:
Much of the discussion about how the below special effects were created depends on your knowledge of many different concepts used in the fields of photography, image processing and 2D and 3D computer graphics. A good working knowledge of Adobe Photoshop would be helpful. Also in many cases, I have written and included specialized C language image processing or computer graphics programs that you can use to duplicate my results. To run these programs though, you must tailor the code to your needs and compile it into an executable on your own computer. Also, you need to remember that the provided code is not commercial code, and therefore was not written to be user friendly. As far as the computer algorithms are concerned, much of that discussion is based on high school and college level geometry, trigonometry, analytic geometry, and of course, many topics in 2D/3D computer graphics. It is simply beyond the scope of this website to completely teach the user about these many topics, although I have tried to provide as much detail as I can. Below is a small list of some of the computer graphics books I use to do CG effects.
Computer Graphics: The Principles Behind the Art and Science - Cornel K. Pokorny <-Very good book
Real-Time Rendering - Tomas Moller
Fundamentals of Interactive Computer Graphics - J.D. Foley & A. Van Dam
Fundamentals of Three-Dimensional Computer Graphics - Alan Watt
Disclaimer:
Star Wars is a registered trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd. Star Trek is a registered trademark of Paramount. Space: 1999 is a registered trademark of Carlton Communications. Logan's Run is a registered trademark of MGM. This website is in no way associated with any of these companies, and it's not the intent of the author to infringe on their rights. This website is only intended to inform and entertain, and no money is being made from it. The few copyrighted images contained within the website remain the property of each image's respective copyright holder(s), and I make no claim to this material.
As for the images and text this author has created, which represents almost all of the images and all of the text, the visitor can copy this material for their own personal use, but unless authorized by the author, the visitor must not post this material on their own websites. A link to my website from your website at some appropriate spot(s) is preferable. I prefer this solution for several reasons. One reason is so my original source material doesn't end up getting spread all over the internet in an uncredited fashion. This approach also cuts down on wasteful redundancy and helps create an elegant connected network of related special effects websites that results in more exposure for everyone.
Last Updated: March 14, 2006
HTML URL: http://geocities.datacellar.net/~special_effect
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