Results and Program Inputs

I hope you have enjoyed learning about how to create these types of effects. Although I certainly enjoyed figuring out how to do the effect, I also found this project to be somewhat difficult. The program required over 90 hours for me to create, with this time being spread out over four months. The program ended up being about 800 lines of C code, excluding comments.

The program is also somewhat computationally intensive because there is so much double precision floating point math going on. Double precision math was used primarily during polygonal scan conversion and anti-aliasing because many of the star streak polygons in the image are over a thousand pixels in length (i.e. 4 digits required) and six digit precision is simply not enough room to do many of the required calculations. This requirement therefore required the use of double precision math.

My Mac 68040 computer, running at 2.5 MFLOPs, required 16 minutes to generate the final frame in the effect with 1,490 star streaks. That's equivalent to about 2.4 billion floating point calculations per image. I think the results I get out of the program are most excellent though and worth the wait. What do you think? As far as I know, this is the only non-ILM generated high resolution hyperspace effect found anywhere on earth.

Program Inputs and Outputs

• All input and output images are stored in (1 byte/pixel) Photoshop RAW format
• Input of user specifed binary starfield image(s) (up to a 4K image)
• Output of grayscale star streak image(s) (up to a 4K image)
• Specification of the center jump point location on the input starfield image
• Control over star streak width magnification over its length
• Override control of all input star diameters
• Functional control over each frame's streak completion (this creates the animation style)
• Perfect pixel registration between animation frames (for static starfields)
• Looping over a series of input images (for moving starfields)