The 2010 tech demo vid and the 19 Nov 2013 vid are one of those illustrations of cosmic scales that too easily lose traction on someone not used to cosmic scales.
In the 2010 vid for instance, around 4’40" the ship slows around an asteroid and then the scales are very clear, but elsewhere in the video the ship accelerates so fast and coasts at such high speed that average people not used to outer space’s dimensions lose their sense of just how fast the ship’s moving, and consequently how large the spatial dimensions are (e.g. the planet, its ring, terrain features) because there’s too few things to judge relative speed and size from. E.G. during re-entry and when the ship first enters the planetary ring.
Unlike on something like this video that makes speed and distance palpable:
Obviously more detail, for now, than the I-Novae engine can handle and that can be produced by art team (vegetation, buildings, etc), but it shows how puny speed like above youtube video still seems faster than the 2010 demo ship does at times, merely because of camera placement and level of visible detail. A static flyby and/or static near-ground camera tracking a ship coming in thru the last part of EDL (narrow angle long distance view from camera as e.g. if zoomed into the great daylight fireball of 1972) all the way till touchdown right near the camera (wide angle view) – that would really impress IMHO. Or e.g. if there had been a fly-by view of the ship from a static camera on the surface of one of those asteroids.
If you look at those “viral” style vids, their immersive trick is less actual CG effects quality and more filming and human POV cues that common people can relate to. E.G. in those Star Wars over SF (1, 2) clips it’s familiarity of atmospheric scattering, HDR/relative brightness, and (overdone for our Kickstarter, but good illustration of the principle) believable cameraman handling.
Where these break immersion is when something too different from reality happens, e.g. a plane that’s supposed to miraculously land with just one wing but clearly has fake physics despite lots of camera shake to conceal it. But also when something’s got both familiar and unfamiliar characteristics, e.g. in Ron Miller’s Earth/Saturn rings illustrations: in most of the shots like Washington or Guatemala, the rings are pretty much like anyone would expect them to look, but in the Polynesia shot the atmospheric distortion and Earth shadow combine to make something that probably jars most people’s credulity.
The same thing happens in the 2010 tech demo vid when the spacecraft dives into the atmosphere at an angle too steep to hint at atmospheric friction, familiar magnitudes of the gravity well’s power relative to the spacecraft’s propulsive power (proportionately huge, even if unesthetic, thruster plumes would better convey the physics at work) when punching thru re-entry and slowing down once near surface, and the camera oriented too steeply down and FOV too narrowed, all together set the flight dynamics into a context that’s too unrelatable for average people, even possibly for too many players used to flying around in God mode with unlimited acceleration as virtual reality allows; at the very least it doesn’t do the engine and art justice.
IMHO the most amazing scenes the engine can render, at least in Kickstarter context, should be scenes that at least start off from or include a few very familiar physical circumstances like in the better-done “viral” vids e.g. the Star Wars over SF ones or the above F-35 ejection trial.
will look so great when traveling trough space … /semi-sarcastic/
