Building The 3D Destiny Model For Stargate Universe

Interesting. A show cancelled before it's time. I always liked the design of the Destiny. [Link]

In the first season of Stargate Universe (SG-U), I had the opportunity of being the Chief Modeler of the Starship “Destiny”. Normally this involves modeling and texturing a ship from concept drawings. However, in this case, due to my experience on Atlantis, I was offered a wider role early in the design process. We commenced work on the ship just as Atlantis was coming to an end. During the conceptual process I received input from visual effects supervisorMark Savela, producer Brad Wright and Robert Cooper.

Concept stage:
Being a 3D artist, I prefer to work in 3 dimensions, so instead of traditional 2d artwork, I kit bashed together over 25 ship designs from recycled parts combined with primitives and composited them in photoshop for the producers to approve. That said, we did not have a distinct look everyone was happy with. Looking for that distinct silouhette, Brad came up with a simple drawing, which took the shape of a Chevron on the Stargates themselves. At this point the interior real world sets were already being built, established via drawings from artist James Robbins. Coincidentally, James also drew up some external ideas to flesh out Brad’s Chevron concept.

The basic look and feel were nailed. Now it was time to bring the Destiny to life based on Brad and Mark’s direction. The Destiny is a very old “Ancient’s” ship. Huge and similar to a floating city in space almost. It needed to have plenty of detailed areas to explore during the lifetime of SG-U.