Time for another Babylon 5 modelling first. Up until this point, people have been limited to using only jump gates for their B5 ships to enter or leave hyperspace. Having built the White Star, which has the capability to form its own jump-point, I obviously wanted a jump-point clone.

I asked Ron Thornton how the effect was achieved, and then proceeded to reproduce the system he described. The jump-point uses four transparency-mapped cones which each morph into flat discs and shrink away. At this point there is a large eruption of light and the vortex dissolves in and expands.

I must point out that the vortex used here is actually Dean A Scott's model, taken from his excellent jump-gate clone. There was no point making another version of this, as Dean Scott's is as accurate as anyone could want. My only addition to the vortex is the new orange / red version of the texture, which should be used when ships are entering, rather than leaving, hyperspace.

UPDATE:

OKAY! I'M SORRY! So I was wrong...

Several people have pointed out errors in my original Jump Point. Of particular note, Chris Guinn noticed that the orange/yellow vortex spiralled in wrong direction, and Zoltan Pentelencsik noted that my colours were a little off. (Forgive me, I'm colour blind...)

Anyway, I've fixed the problems, and now everything should be fine. For the blue vortex, I've used Dean Scott's colours (0,170,255 and 0,90,140). For the orangey vortex, I grabbed some B5 video footage and sampled the correct colours from the resulting images. The colours used are 234,149,72 and 173,104,41. Additionally, I have doubled the size of the fractal texture, increased the contrast from 1 to 1.2 and bumped-up the frequencies to 5 rather than 4. I think you'll be happy with the results.

The ammended Jump Point is available for download from the bottom of this page.