A couple of months ago I wrote about a case of raging shiplove that had gripped me after seeing Attack of the Clones. Inspired by some of Doug Chiang's fantastic designs I decided to draft a spaceship of my own. And now I have.


Attack of the Clones, the latest brainchild of George Lucas and ILM, opens with the majestic descent of a reflective art deco flying-wing spaceplane called the Royal Naboo Cruiser (whose throaty purr I love almost as much as the rushing 747 sound of the Millennium Falcon). It is a beautiful sequence, and definitely the best opening of any Star Wars episode. Hats off to all responsible.

I tried to make my own Royal Naboo Cruiser one weekend, and got stuck about 9/10ths of way along when I realised that I had made a slight, but significant, error when I had been 1/10th of the way along. Theoretically, if I start over again informed by my first attempt I could resolve the issue and make a passable replica to play with. On the other hand, it's discouraging to start over again, and I have more fun things to play with, so I'm not sure when this hypothetical second kick at the can will take place, if ever. This is what the incomplete, slightly warped model looks like now.

I also liked the way that the Refugee Starfreighter flew, so I decided to design a variation based on its overall look and feel, with cylindrical thrusters at the upper-rear and a similar boat-like prow. I combined the prow with certain aspects of the front of the Event Horizon spaceship (which looked cool on the outside despite the fact that it was designed for a really crappy movie). For a colour scheme I looked to Luke Skywalker's Landspeeder and the two-tone paint job of the battleship Argo from Starblazers.

The result: a dirty orange cargo freighter called the Samundra.

I took it out and drove it around a bit for fun. We flew around, dropped through hyperspace, and then flew around a little more. You can see the unfinished, aimless adventure here (QuickTime required).

...As an adolescent this is the fun I always wanted to have with physical modelling (you know, assembling plastic model kits with semi-narcotic glue) but never could because I was such a crappy model-maker. I was impatient and messy. My models always came out crooked, with smudged paint jobs and peeling, misaligned decals. Now I can not only make models that are reasonably symmetrical (and well coloured-in), but I can also toss them around in a model universe. That is the kind of fun that before this pixelated age had been the private pleasure of the hardcore model train hobbyist exclusively.

What would I do without my computers? Whee!


Production notes:
The ship was modelled in the ElectricImage Universe Modeler. The main hull was defined by a series of a wire ribs, and then skinned laterally. The thrusters are composed of two interlocking lathed shapes, the inner mechanisms (grey) and the outer housing (orange). The remaining components are simple extrusions and boolean transformations. The paint job is mostly drawn with procedural shaders, accented with grime and details composed by hand in Photoshop. The model was lit and animated with ElectricImage Universe Animator, and rendered with Universe Camera running under MacOS X. The shots were composited in AfterEffects.