Logopolis & Castrovalva: Wandering the corridors of the TARDIS

[MttElby]

That set construction model is very enlightening.  I've done some theater and of course lived in the Real World (most of the time), but other than seeing some TV sets on a tour of the Warner Brothers studios decades  ago, I don't have experience with TV sets.  It's neat, how one side is open--the same side--on the sets.  They don't need to spend money on a wall that would actually just get in the way and the way it's built it's fast and easy to move the camera to the next scene.

If you look at behind the scenes shots like this one...

... you can see how the realities of the large, cable-fed cameras played a part in set design. There's no following an actor through a doorway with one of those! Then there's the issue of the huge lighting rigs.

  I assume that one corner cubby just gets redressed as a bedroom or a hallway or whatever they need for 90% of the shots of the TARDIS interior.  Do your dialog shot and have the actors walk off out of frame down the "corridor," then set up and have them walk into frame with the set they just left now being the location they just got to.

They got increasingly cunning in how they re-used corridors from different directions, as time went on, with the Terminus corridor set being particularly clever, as it appears to be a completely different part of the TARDIS to what we normally see, but included within it is the normal console room door and corridor, not visible because of the camera angle chosen.

The invention of free-standing and easily re-positioned corridor columns for Castrovalva also made it easier to make the same corridor look different (although they could have tried harder to hide the console room door, which is a bit of a giveaway).

 

[MttElby]

After opening and closing police box doors in recent renders, here's some animations of other TARDIS doors:

https://rumble.com/v65xjyj-logopolis-animations-1-opening-tardis-doors.html

https://rumble.com/v65xkk7-logopolis-animations-2-doors-galore.html

 

[MttElby]

Another surprising find of an actual prop, or very close to it.

This time it's Romana's mirror, visible in Full Circle and Logopolis, although more in the behind-the-scenes photos than in the episodes.

Here it is on the Logopolis set:


And here's the find:


It's even available on Etsy for anyone who wants the prop:
https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1698882306/stunning-art-nouveau-brass-lady-by-the

I had started modelling it from scratch and wasn't looking forward to how much guesswork there was going to be (it didn't even look like it was made of brass in the original screenshots), so this is a real boost. ;D

 

[MttElby]

I spoke too soon. Although the other one is very close. I think this is the actual one:



https://www.chairish.com/product/605133/art-nouveau-brass-mirror-lady-by-the-lake

 

[MttElby]

I've just finished my first attempt at virtual walking in the TARDIS corridors - a whopping 2 seconds.

This was supposed to be a much longer walk (more like 12 seconds), but the render time is now very high, so I'd left it to run overnight. Unfortunately, there was a setting I missed that meant Windows put up the lock screen after the first 24 frames, which paused the rendering. 

Anyway, here's the first hints of what it will be like:
https://rumble.com/v6ak60j-logopolis-animations-3-corridor-entry.html

 

[Mike Verta]

What are you rendering this in?

 

[MttElby]

What are you rendering this in?

Plain old Blender. Actually, it's Blender 2.92, so I suppose it's less than plain.

 

[Mike Verta]

If you want to put it out as .obj or .fbx I can put it on my V-Ray farm for you; just let me know.

 

[MttElby]

If you want to put it out as .obj or .fbx I can put it on my V-Ray farm for you; just let me know.

Thanks for the generous offer.

At the moment, I'm only doing tests and experiments, so won't bother you with those, but once I'm ready to hit "go" on the full-quality render I may take you up on it.

I discovered why the renders had been so incredibly slow (50 minutes per frame, versus less than 5 minutes previously), it was because the PC I was using for the overnight renders didn't have a GPU that Blender could use. I even tried Blender 4.2, but it just reported there was no suitable GPU for all the options. My usual PC does have a usable GPU, so that explains the difference.

In the end, I stopped the render short as it had been running all weekend and had only done about a quarter of the frames, but I've stuck what it had done up here:

https://rumble.com/v6bh1jm-logopolis-animations-4-a-bit-more.html

It's still only 8 seconds long...

The movement is far from smooth, because the camera isn't following a path - it was just me manually moving it through, trying not to hit a wall.

 

[Mike Verta]

There are also all the materials and lighting optimizations which can completely transform render times, but those are of course engine-specific. In any case, I do these visualizations and flythroughs every day so if you need an assist just let me know.

 

[MttElby]

For the sake of speed, I've temporarily sacrificed the photorealism, so I can see how the animation looks without waiting very long.

https://rumble.com/v6bndqm-logopolis-animations-5-corridor-run.html

A whole 11 seconds this time, but it rendered in only a few minutes.

 

[MttElby]

Romana's mirror in position:


And a view from further back:


The shelves are still mostly empty, so more knick-knacks on the way.

 

[MttElby]

A fancy vase for the top shelf:

 

[MttElby]

Three more items on the mirror's shelf and one on the bottom shelf:

 

[MttElby]

It's becoming increasingly hard to work out what some of the shadowy blobs on the shelves in Romana's Logopolis room are, so I have been looking at the shelves as they were in Full Circle to see if I can identify the same objects in both stories. The answer is no, beyond the fact that she had several seashells in Full Circle, that could be some of the blobs in Logopolis.

Assuming that most of her possessions that were given shelf space would be ones she wanted to keep, I've now added two gold-rimmed glass boxes from Full Circle onto my version of her shelves, temporarily in the same place as they were in the earlier story.

 

[MttElby]

A round tin on the bottom shelf, and a leather-bound book (as seen in Full Circle) on the chair:

 

[MttElby]

Another Full Circle book.

 

[rassilonsrod]

These renders are looking beautiful!

 

[MttElby]

These renders are looking beautiful!

Thanks, I'm getting better, but there's still a lot of finger-crossing involved. I never quite know what the de-noising algorithm is going to do. Sometimes it works miracles, other times it creates bizarre distortion artefacts, making it look like the scene from the start of Terminus when Nyssa's room is dissolving. 

 

[MttElby]

I've now added the grey dress from Nightmare Of Eden, which surprisingly is the lot for the hatstand. As far as I can tell there aren't any more of Romana's clothes hanging up in the Logopolis version of her room. I guess the marsh men must have ruined the other outfits.