Display MoreLast night, AD picked up an old magazine and put down an unseen Wing Commander ship design! What he found was a 1999 advertisement for a company called BOXX Technologies which produces high spec computers for the film industry. The premise of the ad is that their computers are the biggest leap for visual effects since they started in 1903 with Georges Méliès's Le Voyage dans la Lune. And their modern example is about how Chris Roberts used their RenderBOXX rendering systems for Wing Commander:
Here's proof: Digital Anvil credits RenderBOXX with saving $2 million on Wing Commander production costs, helping the film land on time and under budget!That would be an interesting factoid in its own right, but the visuals used to represent this are even more interesting! They show a collection of high tech starfighters blasting out of film frames displaying frames from Le Voyage dans la Lune: literally expressing the hundred year jump to Wing Commander. It looks like the ad was used in a variety of trade publications. With a brief search we located copies in Computer Graphics World (November 1999), American Cinematographer (September 1999) and Broadcast Engineering ("The Journal of Digital Television", July 1999).
But what are the ships? They aren't the Wing Commander movie's Rapiers so the first thought was that they must be generic artwork. That didn't seem quite right, though, because they are distinctly 'Digital Anvil' styled, looking like something right out of StarLancer or Conquest. And then we noticed the credit in the bottom corner: "3D Models created by John Sommer". A little research then revealed that Mr. Sommer was indeed a 3D artist at Digital Anvil credited on StarLancer and others! So are they reused StarLancer assets? They didn't match any particular ship in the game and an even closer look reveals that they have custom textures with the company logo on the top of the fuselage:
Then we realized that John Sommer is actually credited as an artist on Wing Commander… he just didn't come up in a search because he's listed John Paul Sommer! So what we have here is a newly created ship designed by Digital Anvil to represent Wing Commander in one of their partner's advertisements. That's a distant connection but we'll take it: the BOXX fighter is canon!
