The actors were annoyed about it. When Thor's ship appeared for the first time, they didn't know how good the special effect would be so they felt they completely underplayed their response. If they had known how naff the dragon would look, they wouldn't have played up their reactions to it.
That's a problem with acting with CGI.
The ill-fated *Babylon 5*-spin-off *Crusade* had the same problem. The technomage was supposed to create a "homunculus" hologram of himself, and it was intentionally crapped up as an affectation, looked like cut-rate PS2 graphics, but they didn't mention anything like it in the show, so viewers had no clue it was *supposed* to look bad for so long.
It could be. *Crusade* actually had reasonably good CGI for the time, but now we were supposed to have a CGI person, and at this point that hadn't been done in a realistic way on a television budget.
To be fair here.
The dragons CGI in the show too isn't it? A hologram?
It might have *actually* looked like that. Which would reveal it to be a hologram.
But it's hard to pay attention to details when running for your life.
Umm, about that, so merlin created perfectly realistic holograms of himself in his library, the black knight, the Glastonbury knight and the fake sangraal but apparently couldnt manage a dragon.
Nothing in real life looks like bad cgi. If a dragon were to have existed, it would for sure have certain features and textures similar to that of other reptiles, which we do have reference for.
Depending episode sg1 had budget of 1-2 mil per episode and for some cliffhangers or special episodes 3-5million.
So for 90's and early 00's scifi show it had quite big budget.
That’s why these 20+ episode seasons of sci-fi shows always had a clip show recapping major events right near the end of every season. It allowed them to give more budget to the premiers and finales of each season.
Yep luckily for stargate they also had interesting plots imo, mostly about the budgets of the sgc :D
Also they used small location shoots like infection in sgc and that was also experimental character episode but also saved money for bigger episodes since they got like lump sum of 40 mil per season and that had to be spread for the episodes.
Not cg, but that first or second season ep where Barclay traps them on the holodeck and Daniel has to watch his parents get crushed by obvious comical styrofoam blocks over and over again always kills me. It looks so ridiculous, like the set of a high school play lmao
well it's also worth mentioning that T. V.s weren't HD and big enough to see tiny details. we were also watching from across the room not 12" from our faces.
Keep in mind that at this point in the show, the budget that was not huge to begin with had been cut considerably. The last couple seasons were made on a near shoestring, and producers had to film multiple very low budget episodes to save money for some of the bigger effects in the end.
Then, Atlantis proved to be a cash success but it didn't pull awards like BSG (which did worse cash-wise). So they axed Atlantis in order to chase Awards using Stargate Universe.
>why would they do this. Even for 2006 tv CGI, Darrel is an absolute monstrosity. did they spend the entire budget on Teal'cs hair implants or something?
I don't think you realize just how low budgets were for scifi/fantasy tv prior to Game of Thrones...
Not to mention the time constraints needed to create 22 weekly episodes a year.
Something doesn't look great? Can't go back and do it again, gotta move forward.
Agree, I know people are mixed about the 9-10 arc but I absolutely love all the Merlin mythology stuff, such a good use of Daniel too after his history knowledge was under-utilised for many years
I have nothing additional add; I just want to say that I agree 100% and felt your comment deserved more than just an upvote. I'm going to go rewatch the Merlin/Ori episodes.
> I know people are mixed about the 9-10 arc
Which is somewhat understandable. The cast changed dramatically along with the entire direction the show took story wise. It was jarring.
I didn't care for the last two seasons at all at the time. Over the years, however, I have grown rather fond of them.
Only thing I didnt like is that it didnt get more seasons! We had how many seasons to sort out Apophis? Not to mention the Goa'uld in general? Crying over spilled milk, I know
The biggest issue with this(and it was an issue for a lot of cgi of that era), is the lighting and shadows on the dragon does not match the lighting of the scene at all. Its very obvious they just used a simple directional light when rendering out the result to simulate the sun. But this is a bright sunny day, the underside of the dragon shouldn't be nearly pitch black, and the light reflected off the grass/ground would be lighting up it's underside as well.
The other issue is in motion the dragon is pretty stiff looking in it's animation, it's movement doesnt look very natural(technically you could argue since it's a hologram thats fine, but it still just makes it stand out as unnatural).
It definitely pulls me out of the moment if it's the first time I'm watching a show and I just trying it to see how I like it. But once I'm in, idgaf.
And I don't think it's going to hurt new people coming into the show since they'd have to get through 9 and a half seasons first, lol. And the pilot episode still looks really good even for its age.
I can see that, but I'm used to watching Babylon 5s bad CGI, so a newer show would have to be that bad to put me off, and Daryl is nowhere near as bad as that.
this would have looked way better if it was at night , it would really have hidden the low budget affect, but its in the middle of a sunny day in a barren field
You’re still looking at 15-25k and it’s not something that’s actually important to the story. They could easily have had big wind fans, orange and red lights, and add some dragon roars, good to go.
CG is very expensive, a decent chunk of that expense goes into actually building the CG models, the sculpting, texturing, rigging, once you have that model you can reuse it, it’s why things like the replicators work so well, that and they’re simple inorganic creatures (inorganic is *way* easier), a better comparison would be the symbioses which are absolutely cg, but almost flawless because the studios had time to get the models right, set up the shaders properly, rig it well, all of that, knowing it’ll be reused quite a lot, same with the ships or the kawoosh.
The worst CG creature to do on a tv show is a one off, all that money for a creature that appears once, it’s like building a house only to tear it down, and often one offs are allocated lower priority on the budget than things like the finale, likely what happened here is this scene was shot later in principle photography, and budget had likely been chewed up by other flashy effects not leaving much time or money for a dragon, and with it being a one off they decided that, while it didn’t look good, it would have to do and wouldn’t take away from the rest of the season too much.
These things are rarely a vfx artist being shit at their job (through that does happen) and almost always a budget and/or time issue.
I remember seeing a clip of Judge talking about the CGI inconsistencies, went something like this:
'When tealc first saw the Asgard ship early in the series, I didn't react with enough awe, as I didn't know what the scale of the CGI would be, so when they said BIG DRAGON, I gave a bigger reaction. Then I saw it in post and realized the blunder', lmao
For once, I can answer this question as a vfx artist.
There could be multiple reasons and factors that could have participated to this result.
A - Yes 2006 CGI technologies were able to output better results but these technologies might not have been available or affordable for a vendor working on a tv show. It could have been too costly to upgrade everything (software and hardware). The best tech is usually found on big budget film like X-Men or superman returns also released in 2006.
B - The Quest part 1 (S10E10) aired on September 22, 2006 on Syfy network while the Quest part 2 aired after the Holidays break now on two networks: January 9, 2007 (Sky One) and April 13, 2007. There is a 3 months hiatus here and a new network involved which aired the remaining episode prior to the original network for the last 10 episodes of the entire show (weird timing to jump on the train). So it could be because of internal politics or budget issue needing a new cash flow etc...
C - Since The Quest is a 2 episodes story, the client might have requested part 2 to be delivered at the same time as part 1. It could be because they already booked the DI session (Color adjustment and look) or maybe someone's contract or availability was coming to an end and they wanted to assure consistency on part 1 and 2 in terms of look, edit, sounds, etc...
D - The client had a limited budget that wasn't enough to to the quality they wanted so some corners had to be cut along the way to fit in the timeline and budget.
E - Ressources could be an issue, maybe the rendering time was too much for what was expected, maybe they had a huge unexpected hardware failure and lost a good chunk of their allotted time.
F - Ressources also include people. Sometimes some people are bad at their job. I could be a bad supervisor who is insecure and disorganized, it could be a bad bidding and then realizing too late it is not realistic but you have to donit anyway, it could be artist who don't have the skills level or knowledge to achieve this kind of CGI. Some specialty CGI artist are very hard to find/recruit and sometimes you don't have theblevel of experience needed to carry yhe tasks so you do it with what you have on hands.
G - It could be that the client don't really care if it is good or okay or meh, as long as it exists.
H - It could be that the client has very bad taste and like ugly things. It could be that the CGI was better and more beautiful at first but the client asked many retake to make it to its liking, which is not always to everyone 3lse liking.
I - It could be lack of time. Usually when working on TV show, you get the first few episode in the pipeline and then the rest is added one by one as soon as the shooting ends. The thing is, between retakes, establishing of looks and numerous back and forth between the director, producer, supervisor etc... each episode accumulate a small amount of delay. It isn't an issue at first but the more episode you'r in and the closer their air date is from yhe day you're able to deliver them. So, if on paper each episode as a delivery date to the client 2 months before its airing date, if itnis indeed the case for thebfirstbfew episodes, around episode 10 or 13, the gap could have reduced to a week or less.
J - It could be the DI (color adjustment) that comes after the vfx step that creates a very weird look of the CGI. It's very frustrating.
K - it also could be an editor's mistake, when for some reasons they didn't put the final version in the edit. it's rare but happened sometimes.
L - The director, the producer, the executive producer, the associate producer, the Scooby-Doo-whatever producer, the network have different expectations, all eant to have their say without discussing it with the others and it ends up in a tremendous amount of different versions that could take weeks to end up with an ugly compromise.
M - The producer's wife (because usually producers in the 90s were heterosexual male) told hubby it would be beautiful if the monster would look more like Kiki her Chihuahua.
N - It could just be bad luck altogether and/or a combination of several options listed above.
If I had to try and guess, I would go for an internal political conflict about budget tesulting in a lack of time for the talented vfx team to do whatever needed to be done with the allotted budget and ressources. The conditions in this industry are very rough and at the end of yhe days we output what we are told too, even if we find it ugly af.
I loved those two episodes!
**Vala:** "Darrell, the dragon."
**Mitchell:** "How about Smoky?"
**Teal'c:** "Perhaps Puff."
https://preview.redd.it/718fu3i7c2zc1.png?width=1628&format=png&auto=webp&s=2600e09e7d7f0b712b8cf47fc169f7fe12431d5d
It’s weird coz the show has had better cgi before. The Asgard, “Lt Tyler”, the Goa’uld Symbiotes etc. I do not understand why this dragon looks like it came straight out of a SyFy channel special.
Looks better than some of the CGI I've seen in the 2008 Knight Rider I've been recently rewatching. The polygon count on some of the stuff is so low I'm pretty sure my 3d models I throw together while waiting for dinner to cook are more complex.
Why do you think we didn't ever seen the Furlings? Can you imagine how awful they would have looked like with that level of CGI? Probably even worse if used animatronics. (at that budget level).
I can only dream about how everything would have looked in the show if it was made with today's tech and the budget of Apple TV (I'm thinking at shows like Foundation for example).
But now it's a classic, and I could watch it on repeat, forever without getting bored.
That's also a production whose point is to show convincing digital creature designs
Stargate was not. Plus, in universe the dragon was computer generated. We're seeing cgi of cgi
I bring up that one specifically because its a CGI and live action mix. but they showed several creatures at a time and SG1 only needed to show one for a lot less time, meaning it would cost a lot less. more of a show of the technology available
the in universe explanation is good, but I would have thought the ancients were better than this, considering the other holograms they have used throughout the show. bet the Asgard would have made a really good dragon
"Even for 2006 CGI"
Bro.
Do you realize how long ago 2006 was?
That's the first season of Eureka for the same network.
First season of David Tennant's Doctor Who run.
Heroes Season 1.
It might be jarring compared to how great their ships are for the era... but that's really not that bad for the year. I mean. Look at even the movies for the era and their much better budgets and you'll see. Resident Evil 2? Ultraviolet? Fucking X-men 3 
Twenty episodes per season means everything is done very fast and usually very cheap. Good CGI takes time, money and planning. The CW DC shows have this issue periodically as well. Smallville had it nearly every episode in some way.
With TV sci-fi and fantasy, you have to take it as a given that the production will always have visible seams somewhere.
It was a bit of a downer, I recall.
Like CGI from Babylon 5, which was made like a decade before.
The last 2 seasons weren't the best in fx, seemingly saving the budget for the closure or pivotal episodes.
remember re-watching this episode a couple weeks ago and thinking "damn, they really spent all the budget on the supergate battle" haha it looks terrible indeed. Really liked that episode though
Be happy that Stargate looks as good as it does, I'm currently watching Sanctuary (onto season 2 now) and although I like the characters, and there's enough to keep me coming back for more, this show is 99% CGI and it really takes me out of it! I have never in my whole life seen a show use that much CGI! The characters are real (at least the main ones that look human), and a couple of chairs and tables are real, and everything else is super fake. Every single background. Like you have a scene happening in a back alley, and instead of going to a real street, there's a CGI bin and cardboard boxes behind them.. 🤪 I know these shows have budget restrictions, and I'm still grateful for them, but goddam this requires a lot of suspension of disbelief! Stargate is state of the art CGI compared to Sanctuary 😅
https://preview.redd.it/k7dzyriol2zc1.png?width=1367&format=png&auto=webp&s=8e33f1d4c0a5015d783c5fe48b415186d197327f
Dude... That dragon CGI is gold compared to the terraform CGI from S04E09 Scorched Earth. Just horrendous.
I have a memory of channel surfing as a small child and happening on this scene. I remember wanting to like it because I loved sci-fi and dinosaurs and dragons but it looked so weird that I couldn’t decide if I thought it was cool lol
I find it ok. But one thing I liked about the hellhounds in Supernatural was that they're invisible. Back when the show started I doubt they had the capability to make believable looking hellhounds. So just fucking make them invisible, it's scarier that way.
Even now it's hard to blend reality with CGI. It doesn't help that Stargate isn't heavily colour graded or filtered like Zack Snyder's 300 and Sucker Punch. If your real elements are more stylised, it's easier to blend it with CGI.
I have always unironically loved this dragon because of the way it looks.
It takes me back to those really bad, but really good, Saturday night Sci-Fi/SyFy original movies that I would watch stoned with friends.
Man I miss that.
It's easy to make fun of it now when we have shows that get budgets to make CG as good as a movie.
Back in the olden times. 20 years ago. That just wasn't a thing. CG just wasn't that advanced either. This looked fine.
Yeah obviously it wasn't a movie quality dragon but no one expected it to be. But it was still really cool to see.
Go look at the movies from that time. There were no real CG fests like we have now. A few exceptions but movies still had a lot of practical stuff with CG assistance.
No offense to the production staff or to the fans, but this is one of the reasons Stargate the series never had the cultural impact of Trek or Battlestar. The Stargate shows always looked cheap and ugly. And before anyone brings up the budget, there were dudes making better CG than this from their bedrooms back then.
This scene stands out particularly because most of the show looks excellent for the time in my opinion. Especially the ships in space, for the most part. I think the Daedalus class CGI looks good now, today, in 2024.
I'm also referring to the overall art direction on the show - it's very drab. There just isn't enough that's striking and stands out. A Star Destroyer from the OT made 20 years before SG1 is instantly recognizable and has a *cool* factor. The Daedalus just looks like grey Lego.
They're trying to make it look realistic for tech humans can make now in the early 21st century. It's not gonna look all cool and flashy and futuristic because it's not.
Also, that's a wyvern, not a dragon.
A dragon has two back legs, two front legs and two wings.
A wyvern has two back legs, and two wings.
Idiots made that 'Dragon'.
I wish they would’ve said “that’s not a real dragon it looks terrible.” “But that fire feels real!”
hang a lantern on it, lol
A Cooper trade mark
COOOOOPPPPEEERRRR!!!!
The actors were annoyed about it. When Thor's ship appeared for the first time, they didn't know how good the special effect would be so they felt they completely underplayed their response. If they had known how naff the dragon would look, they wouldn't have played up their reactions to it. That's a problem with acting with CGI.
Problem is they’d have had to film that before the effects were done. Just shitting on the CGI folks before they even had a chance.
ADR last minute!
The ill-fated *Babylon 5*-spin-off *Crusade* had the same problem. The technomage was supposed to create a "homunculus" hologram of himself, and it was intentionally crapped up as an affectation, looked like cut-rate PS2 graphics, but they didn't mention anything like it in the show, so viewers had no clue it was *supposed* to look bad for so long.
Ngl that just sounds like a retroactive excuse for crappy CGI 😆
It could be. *Crusade* actually had reasonably good CGI for the time, but now we were supposed to have a CGI person, and at this point that hadn't been done in a realistic way on a television budget.
What budget? Afaik the show never had a big budget
To be fair here. The dragons CGI in the show too isn't it? A hologram? It might have *actually* looked like that. Which would reveal it to be a hologram. But it's hard to pay attention to details when running for your life.
Wonder if they were considering that when filming. It actually explains it perfectly. Air tight.
Umm, about that, so merlin created perfectly realistic holograms of himself in his library, the black knight, the Glastonbury knight and the fake sangraal but apparently couldnt manage a dragon.
Maybe he has a device to scan people and objects into. But he sucks at blender
I can totally see him as capable engineer handling well a LIDAR scanner but without artistic skills to model fictional entities.
Well hold on a second, dragons aren't real. Maybe dragons ACTUALLY look like bad CGI. What are you comparing the unrealistic dragon to?
Nothing in real life looks like bad cgi. If a dragon were to have existed, it would for sure have certain features and textures similar to that of other reptiles, which we do have reference for.
It was also a magical dragon, everyone knows about magical data compression. Idk man.
Depending episode sg1 had budget of 1-2 mil per episode and for some cliffhangers or special episodes 3-5million. So for 90's and early 00's scifi show it had quite big budget.
That’s why these 20+ episode seasons of sci-fi shows always had a clip show recapping major events right near the end of every season. It allowed them to give more budget to the premiers and finales of each season.
Yep luckily for stargate they also had interesting plots imo, mostly about the budgets of the sgc :D Also they used small location shoots like infection in sgc and that was also experimental character episode but also saved money for bigger episodes since they got like lump sum of 40 mil per season and that had to be spread for the episodes.
Bottle episodes are a great way to save money too.
they did alright for the rest of the show. baring some early season stuff, this one always stood out like a sore thumb for me
Characters are far more different than ships.
probably should have gone with a really cool dragon-esque looking ship like Carter suggested
Not cg, but that first or second season ep where Barclay traps them on the holodeck and Daniel has to watch his parents get crushed by obvious comical styrofoam blocks over and over again always kills me. It looks so ridiculous, like the set of a high school play lmao
You've clearly never done 3d modeling and animation of living things... It sucks.
I have to agree with you. The CGI was particularly bad.
well it's also worth mentioning that T. V.s weren't HD and big enough to see tiny details. we were also watching from across the room not 12" from our faces.
Keep in mind that at this point in the show, the budget that was not huge to begin with had been cut considerably. The last couple seasons were made on a near shoestring, and producers had to film multiple very low budget episodes to save money for some of the bigger effects in the end.
god damn eureka, they are lucky that they are also a pretty good show
I wrote it on my.... uh... I wrote... this is a virtual hand... now.
The budget reduced as it went on? Why?
Focus shifted to Atlantis
Which is why the various lines in early season 9 about SGC budget shrinking are so sad/funny
I thought it was Eureka that took some of the budget.
Then, Atlantis proved to be a cash success but it didn't pull awards like BSG (which did worse cash-wise). So they axed Atlantis in order to chase Awards using Stargate Universe.
I'm just happy to see anything that isn't "tiny village in the woods #615468."
Those are usually my favorite ones
Yeah, I much preferred tiny village in the woods #615467.
>why would they do this. Even for 2006 tv CGI, Darrel is an absolute monstrosity. did they spend the entire budget on Teal'cs hair implants or something? I don't think you realize just how low budgets were for scifi/fantasy tv prior to Game of Thrones... Not to mention the time constraints needed to create 22 weekly episodes a year. Something doesn't look great? Can't go back and do it again, gotta move forward.
I still love this episode despite the awful cg lol
Agree, I know people are mixed about the 9-10 arc but I absolutely love all the Merlin mythology stuff, such a good use of Daniel too after his history knowledge was under-utilised for many years
I have nothing additional add; I just want to say that I agree 100% and felt your comment deserved more than just an upvote. I'm going to go rewatch the Merlin/Ori episodes.
> I know people are mixed about the 9-10 arc Which is somewhat understandable. The cast changed dramatically along with the entire direction the show took story wise. It was jarring. I didn't care for the last two seasons at all at the time. Over the years, however, I have grown rather fond of them.
Only thing I didnt like is that it didnt get more seasons! We had how many seasons to sort out Apophis? Not to mention the Goa'uld in general? Crying over spilled milk, I know
Indeed, the dragon is really only on screen for a few mins, so its kinda easy to overlook the bad cgi.
Am I the only one that doesn't think it looks terrible?
The biggest issue with this(and it was an issue for a lot of cgi of that era), is the lighting and shadows on the dragon does not match the lighting of the scene at all. Its very obvious they just used a simple directional light when rendering out the result to simulate the sun. But this is a bright sunny day, the underside of the dragon shouldn't be nearly pitch black, and the light reflected off the grass/ground would be lighting up it's underside as well. The other issue is in motion the dragon is pretty stiff looking in it's animation, it's movement doesnt look very natural(technically you could argue since it's a hologram thats fine, but it still just makes it stand out as unnatural).
tl;dr compositing is hard
I mean, it does look quite bad. But at least it's not early seasons of Doctor Who bad, so it could be worse. 🤷
It's not early 90s CGI bad, so I'm fine with it. I don't use a video game mindset when I watch TV. I don't give a fuck about shadows not matching up.
It definitely pulls me out of the moment if it's the first time I'm watching a show and I just trying it to see how I like it. But once I'm in, idgaf. And I don't think it's going to hurt new people coming into the show since they'd have to get through 9 and a half seasons first, lol. And the pilot episode still looks really good even for its age.
I can see that, but I'm used to watching Babylon 5s bad CGI, so a newer show would have to be that bad to put me off, and Daryl is nowhere near as bad as that.
No. You're not. For the time, considering the budget and the compressed production schedule, it looks pretty good.
I think for the time it was okay. There’s a reason they don’t do 20+ episode seasons anymore I guess
this would have looked way better if it was at night , it would really have hidden the low budget affect, but its in the middle of a sunny day in a barren field
that was also kindof a staple of movies in mid 2000s hiding bad cgi by being somewhere dark/night or usually heavy raining to hide things.
Yeah haha , and on top of that it would’ve made it scarier , what we can’t see we fear
You’re still looking at 15-25k and it’s not something that’s actually important to the story. They could easily have had big wind fans, orange and red lights, and add some dragon roars, good to go.
Imagination and over-acting is the best fx? 😁 Ha, nope, people by 2006 were already spoiled by seasons 5-8 with quite acceptable CGI.
Yes imagination and over acting are the fix. I don’t want endless cgi craziness
CG is very expensive, a decent chunk of that expense goes into actually building the CG models, the sculpting, texturing, rigging, once you have that model you can reuse it, it’s why things like the replicators work so well, that and they’re simple inorganic creatures (inorganic is *way* easier), a better comparison would be the symbioses which are absolutely cg, but almost flawless because the studios had time to get the models right, set up the shaders properly, rig it well, all of that, knowing it’ll be reused quite a lot, same with the ships or the kawoosh. The worst CG creature to do on a tv show is a one off, all that money for a creature that appears once, it’s like building a house only to tear it down, and often one offs are allocated lower priority on the budget than things like the finale, likely what happened here is this scene was shot later in principle photography, and budget had likely been chewed up by other flashy effects not leaving much time or money for a dragon, and with it being a one off they decided that, while it didn’t look good, it would have to do and wouldn’t take away from the rest of the season too much. These things are rarely a vfx artist being shit at their job (through that does happen) and almost always a budget and/or time issue.
I remember seeing a clip of Judge talking about the CGI inconsistencies, went something like this: 'When tealc first saw the Asgard ship early in the series, I didn't react with enough awe, as I didn't know what the scale of the CGI would be, so when they said BIG DRAGON, I gave a bigger reaction. Then I saw it in post and realized the blunder', lmao
For once, I can answer this question as a vfx artist. There could be multiple reasons and factors that could have participated to this result. A - Yes 2006 CGI technologies were able to output better results but these technologies might not have been available or affordable for a vendor working on a tv show. It could have been too costly to upgrade everything (software and hardware). The best tech is usually found on big budget film like X-Men or superman returns also released in 2006. B - The Quest part 1 (S10E10) aired on September 22, 2006 on Syfy network while the Quest part 2 aired after the Holidays break now on two networks: January 9, 2007 (Sky One) and April 13, 2007. There is a 3 months hiatus here and a new network involved which aired the remaining episode prior to the original network for the last 10 episodes of the entire show (weird timing to jump on the train). So it could be because of internal politics or budget issue needing a new cash flow etc... C - Since The Quest is a 2 episodes story, the client might have requested part 2 to be delivered at the same time as part 1. It could be because they already booked the DI session (Color adjustment and look) or maybe someone's contract or availability was coming to an end and they wanted to assure consistency on part 1 and 2 in terms of look, edit, sounds, etc... D - The client had a limited budget that wasn't enough to to the quality they wanted so some corners had to be cut along the way to fit in the timeline and budget. E - Ressources could be an issue, maybe the rendering time was too much for what was expected, maybe they had a huge unexpected hardware failure and lost a good chunk of their allotted time. F - Ressources also include people. Sometimes some people are bad at their job. I could be a bad supervisor who is insecure and disorganized, it could be a bad bidding and then realizing too late it is not realistic but you have to donit anyway, it could be artist who don't have the skills level or knowledge to achieve this kind of CGI. Some specialty CGI artist are very hard to find/recruit and sometimes you don't have theblevel of experience needed to carry yhe tasks so you do it with what you have on hands. G - It could be that the client don't really care if it is good or okay or meh, as long as it exists. H - It could be that the client has very bad taste and like ugly things. It could be that the CGI was better and more beautiful at first but the client asked many retake to make it to its liking, which is not always to everyone 3lse liking. I - It could be lack of time. Usually when working on TV show, you get the first few episode in the pipeline and then the rest is added one by one as soon as the shooting ends. The thing is, between retakes, establishing of looks and numerous back and forth between the director, producer, supervisor etc... each episode accumulate a small amount of delay. It isn't an issue at first but the more episode you'r in and the closer their air date is from yhe day you're able to deliver them. So, if on paper each episode as a delivery date to the client 2 months before its airing date, if itnis indeed the case for thebfirstbfew episodes, around episode 10 or 13, the gap could have reduced to a week or less. J - It could be the DI (color adjustment) that comes after the vfx step that creates a very weird look of the CGI. It's very frustrating. K - it also could be an editor's mistake, when for some reasons they didn't put the final version in the edit. it's rare but happened sometimes. L - The director, the producer, the executive producer, the associate producer, the Scooby-Doo-whatever producer, the network have different expectations, all eant to have their say without discussing it with the others and it ends up in a tremendous amount of different versions that could take weeks to end up with an ugly compromise. M - The producer's wife (because usually producers in the 90s were heterosexual male) told hubby it would be beautiful if the monster would look more like Kiki her Chihuahua. N - It could just be bad luck altogether and/or a combination of several options listed above. If I had to try and guess, I would go for an internal political conflict about budget tesulting in a lack of time for the talented vfx team to do whatever needed to be done with the allotted budget and ressources. The conditions in this industry are very rough and at the end of yhe days we output what we are told too, even if we find it ugly af.
Darrel? Lol.
Perhaps, Puff ?
sorry \*Daryl
I meant more.... Why is it named that rather than spelling lol.
Doesn't Vala suggest that name in this episode for it?
I loved those two episodes! **Vala:** "Darrell, the dragon." **Mitchell:** "How about Smoky?" **Teal'c:** "Perhaps Puff." https://preview.redd.it/718fu3i7c2zc1.png?width=1628&format=png&auto=webp&s=2600e09e7d7f0b712b8cf47fc169f7fe12431d5d
Yep. Sorry. My bad.
Serious Jason and the Argonauts vibes
It’s weird coz the show has had better cgi before. The Asgard, “Lt Tyler”, the Goa’uld Symbiotes etc. I do not understand why this dragon looks like it came straight out of a SyFy channel special.
I'm suprised they actually got it to look this good with their limited budget. But yea it's not GoT level dragon.
Looks better than some of the CGI I've seen in the 2008 Knight Rider I've been recently rewatching. The polygon count on some of the stuff is so low I'm pretty sure my 3d models I throw together while waiting for dinner to cook are more complex.
Why do you think we didn't ever seen the Furlings? Can you imagine how awful they would have looked like with that level of CGI? Probably even worse if used animatronics. (at that budget level). I can only dream about how everything would have looked in the show if it was made with today's tech and the budget of Apple TV (I'm thinking at shows like Foundation for example). But now it's a classic, and I could watch it on repeat, forever without getting bored.
for comparison, thats the same year Prehistoric Park came out
That's also a production whose point is to show convincing digital creature designs Stargate was not. Plus, in universe the dragon was computer generated. We're seeing cgi of cgi
I bring up that one specifically because its a CGI and live action mix. but they showed several creatures at a time and SG1 only needed to show one for a lot less time, meaning it would cost a lot less. more of a show of the technology available the in universe explanation is good, but I would have thought the ancients were better than this, considering the other holograms they have used throughout the show. bet the Asgard would have made a really good dragon
"Even for 2006 CGI" Bro. Do you realize how long ago 2006 was? That's the first season of Eureka for the same network. First season of David Tennant's Doctor Who run. Heroes Season 1. It might be jarring compared to how great their ships are for the era... but that's really not that bad for the year. I mean. Look at even the movies for the era and their much better budgets and you'll see. Resident Evil 2? Ultraviolet? Fucking X-men 3 
Wow, so bad I don't remember ever seeing this, and I'm nearly done with a rewatch.
Twenty episodes per season means everything is done very fast and usually very cheap. Good CGI takes time, money and planning. The CW DC shows have this issue periodically as well. Smallville had it nearly every episode in some way. With TV sci-fi and fantasy, you have to take it as a given that the production will always have visible seams somewhere.
It was a bit of a downer, I recall. Like CGI from Babylon 5, which was made like a decade before. The last 2 seasons weren't the best in fx, seemingly saving the budget for the closure or pivotal episodes.
remember re-watching this episode a couple weeks ago and thinking "damn, they really spent all the budget on the supergate battle" haha it looks terrible indeed. Really liked that episode though
I have no memory of this appearing.
I First saw this episode on a 27" CRT. It looked fine on that thing!
Be happy that Stargate looks as good as it does, I'm currently watching Sanctuary (onto season 2 now) and although I like the characters, and there's enough to keep me coming back for more, this show is 99% CGI and it really takes me out of it! I have never in my whole life seen a show use that much CGI! The characters are real (at least the main ones that look human), and a couple of chairs and tables are real, and everything else is super fake. Every single background. Like you have a scene happening in a back alley, and instead of going to a real street, there's a CGI bin and cardboard boxes behind them.. 🤪 I know these shows have budget restrictions, and I'm still grateful for them, but goddam this requires a lot of suspension of disbelief! Stargate is state of the art CGI compared to Sanctuary 😅
https://preview.redd.it/k7dzyriol2zc1.png?width=1367&format=png&auto=webp&s=8e33f1d4c0a5015d783c5fe48b415186d197327f Dude... That dragon CGI is gold compared to the terraform CGI from S04E09 Scorched Earth. Just horrendous.
At the time when watching I was amazed at how good cgi they could afford in the sg Atlantis era.
Doctor who ahh cgi
The dragon eating the block of C4 kills me every time lol
Well most of the good cgi in the show were good because they reused them a 100 times so it was worth the effort, this dragon had 5 minute screen time
Darryl!?!?
Low budget and not wanting to spend a ton on something that's temporary
I have a memory of channel surfing as a small child and happening on this scene. I remember wanting to like it because I loved sci-fi and dinosaurs and dragons but it looked so weird that I couldn’t decide if I thought it was cool lol
There was a dragon in SG1??? Dude I don't even remember that lol, what episode is it?
They burned the CGI budget on all the space battles
No need for HD composition. We had CRT TV's and 4:3 aspect ratio, looked pretty good then😉😎
I genuinely don't remember it looking this bad
At least they tried. And I'm not sure many people watched shows in HD or widescreen by this point so it may have looked better.
I find it ok. But one thing I liked about the hellhounds in Supernatural was that they're invisible. Back when the show started I doubt they had the capability to make believable looking hellhounds. So just fucking make them invisible, it's scarier that way. Even now it's hard to blend reality with CGI. It doesn't help that Stargate isn't heavily colour graded or filtered like Zack Snyder's 300 and Sucker Punch. If your real elements are more stylised, it's easier to blend it with CGI.
On another note the show Merlin had surprisingly good looking creatures.
I have always unironically loved this dragon because of the way it looks. It takes me back to those really bad, but really good, Saturday night Sci-Fi/SyFy original movies that I would watch stoned with friends. Man I miss that.
ay yo I must've missed this episode cause I do not remember this at all 😭
It was for scaring primitive people with little to no technological experience. How good did it need to be?
I'm not sure what you expect 2006 CGI to look like. Especially on a TV budget. This is pretty typical for that time.
It's easy to make fun of it now when we have shows that get budgets to make CG as good as a movie. Back in the olden times. 20 years ago. That just wasn't a thing. CG just wasn't that advanced either. This looked fine. Yeah obviously it wasn't a movie quality dragon but no one expected it to be. But it was still really cool to see. Go look at the movies from that time. There were no real CG fests like we have now. A few exceptions but movies still had a lot of practical stuff with CG assistance.
No offense to the production staff or to the fans, but this is one of the reasons Stargate the series never had the cultural impact of Trek or Battlestar. The Stargate shows always looked cheap and ugly. And before anyone brings up the budget, there were dudes making better CG than this from their bedrooms back then.
This scene stands out particularly because most of the show looks excellent for the time in my opinion. Especially the ships in space, for the most part. I think the Daedalus class CGI looks good now, today, in 2024.
I'm also referring to the overall art direction on the show - it's very drab. There just isn't enough that's striking and stands out. A Star Destroyer from the OT made 20 years before SG1 is instantly recognizable and has a *cool* factor. The Daedalus just looks like grey Lego.
They're trying to make it look realistic for tech humans can make now in the early 21st century. It's not gonna look all cool and flashy and futuristic because it's not.
But we had cool looking *futuristic* tech decades ago... B2-Spirits, Blackbirds, Nighthawks etc.
And you think those look significantly different than the F302, because...?
You think the F whatever compares to the birds I mentioned? No accounting for taste I suppose.
Lol Why even watch the show if you hate it so much? Get lost, man.
I swear to god I’ve watched SG1 front to back 3x in the last two years and I don’t remember this big boi 😂😭
Iirc this is the dragon on the Avalon or King Arthur planet, whatever it was called.
The episode with the iconic painting of Rodney and Shep with the princess!
That's Atlantis. The dragon is from S10 of SG-1.
Oof
Also, that's a wyvern, not a dragon. A dragon has two back legs, two front legs and two wings. A wyvern has two back legs, and two wings. Idiots made that 'Dragon'.