This is the second ship that I made for the film. It gets a lot of use and at first there was a shot planned where the front of the shuttle fills the entire width of the shot, so the model and the texturing had to stand up to that. In the end that shot was canned and for most of the movie the textures were reduced to half size to help with rendering times.

What I did: I hand built the model, I painted the textures and I surfaced the model. All of the textures on this model are entirely hand painted and there is no scanned photo reference used... none at all.

This is an absolutely clean test render that I did whilst I was texturing the head and side thrusters. This version is reduced to a 1024 pixel wide image but the render itself is actually 2048 pixels wide (film res... just about). I've put this one here because almost nobody will be able to see the whole image all at once if it's 2K whereas most people can see all of a 1K.

Click on the image to see a 1024 pixel wide version.

The 2K version! Look at this one. Really. Look at it in Photoshop if you like. Whatever. I'm pretty sure it'll withstand almost any degree of withering scrutiny. I was very happy with this one. Go in close and look at bubbles on the surface, the panel lines... and it's all hand painted.

Click on the image to see a 2048 pixel wide version.

And this is how it looks without the textures. Ooh look... No panel lines...

Click on the image to see a 1024 pixel wide version.

Here are a few shots of the whole model without textures so you can see what's going on. This one is looking at the top behind the head. At some point I might have to dig out the model and do some really close up renders to show just how much detail there is, quite a lot of it is lost at this size.

Click on the image to see a 1024 pixel wide version.

The underside. The contoured panel is where the RRU sits when it's docked.

Click on the image to see a 1024 pixel wide version.

And finally, a view from behind showing plenty of nurnage. The two assemblies that look vaguely like shock absorbers or hydraulics were the cause of probably my favourite moment from the whole of Supernova... I designed those things and added them to the digital model, at which point the boys in the model shop had to come and look at them so they could build them for the physical model.

Click on the image to see a 1024 pixel wide version.