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GUNSTAR

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Trust futurist Ron Cobb's amazing design sensibility to find itself in the vanguard of CGI spaceships; the eponymous vessel of Nick Castle's SF Disney outing became the first of its type to reach the big screen. As with the previously ground-breaking Tron a couple of years earlier, the film's plot uses a video-game premise to bridge the visual gap between the photo-real and the more stylised renderings of the spacecraft and battles, and the conceit sells the concept.

The ship itself is a dream - more armed than Kali, with a sexy cylindrical fuselage tapering off into a forward-moving cockpit. The Gunstar is also one of only a handful of ships in this list that take off vertically. The cowling on the rear hull, the insouciant curves of the thrusters and the patina of high-engineering makes the design compelling. It's also very rear-heavy, which practical design concept (the rear is where the space-consuming boosters and fuel are likely to be) adds to the sense of practicality.

Digital Productions created twenty-seven minutes of CGI footage for the movie, rendering out the ray-traced scenes on a Cray X-MP supercomputer. Every frame of CGI in the movie had an average of 250,000 polygons, and was rendered at 3000x5000 pixels in 36-bit colour. You know what? I could handle a remake of this. Lucky, since I'm going to be getting one anyway. I would love to see the Gunstar done justice with current VFX technology.

But the most appealing form to have this ship in is arguably that in which it has never existed - the real world. Frontier models have a beautiful mounted hobby resin kit available. Here's a superb Lego Gunstar. Unsatisfied with another kit version, Randy Cooper scratch-built a Gunstar and sold it to Monsters In Motion (scroll down a bit). As for CG hobbyists, it's not inappropriate that there be a basic mesh of the ship available. But if you're looking for class CG work on the design, check out this project, with appropriate procedural textures.

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aboveaverageprods's avatar
why settle for a remake when you can have a sequel to the movie. Check out my designs and story ideas for the movie on my account. Nice layout by the way.