Work In Progress:
Battlestar Galactica

In the middle of May 1998, I began work on a 3D model of the Battlestar Galactica, from the eponymous television series of the late 1970's. After creating a model of the U.S.S. Enterprise, I was looking for something more challenging to model, and the Galactica seemed the ideal choice.

After about three weeks, working one or two hours a night during the weekdays, and off and on during the weekends, I have completed about 60% of the top half of the forward section. Part of that time was used to write a program to create mirror images of many objects, as the Galactica is more or less symmetrical.

Working from photographs of the studio filming model, which I found on the Web, I first created technical drawings of the hull features using CorelDRAW!, and used those drawings as a guide for placing the objects.

Currently, the model contains over 1500 objects, though some of these will probably never be seen -- for example, miniature rooms behind many windows, as shown in the picture at the right. This picture is an extreme closeup of the panel just forward of the "alcove" near the back of the ship's forward section. If you look closely at the bottom window, you may be able to make out three Colonial warriors sitting around a table, playing the card game Pyramid, with what might be a painting of the Caprican landscape on the wall behind them.