The models from Battlestar Galactica Online render surprisingly well. Aside from the foreground Basestar, you can hardly tell the ships are video-game quality. Maybe I’ll go on another expedition to pull more models out from the game’s files. That’s pretty much all there is to this image. I was applying the texture maps to the model, saw how nicely the light played along it and how well the little window-things stood out, and decided to instance out a bunch more Basestars and add some fill light. It definitely helps that, in the show, the Cylons never seemed to care much for the orientation of their ships. There are a few places were they overlap in the frame, but I checked, there weren’t any intersections. The random seed just doesn’t have a good eye for composition.

The Cylon Basestar is one of several ships that was redesigned in the second half of Battlestar Galactica’s run.¹Most, if not all, of the new versions being created by the inimitable Pierre Drolet. The Cylon ships probably needed it the most, as when the show was first being developed, it wasn’t expected that the Cylons would be seen much after the opening miniseries, and you can tell that their ships didn’t get the same amount of detail as models like the Galactica and the Vipers. I generally prefer the redesigned versions of the BSG ships (with the exception of the Viper Mark VII, whose new model is just kind of weird-looking compared to the sleeker original), and it’s nice to have a new-style Basestar to play with.²Attentive readers may recall that my work with the Diaspora game project gave me the opportunity to work with a Basestar based on the version seen in the first half of the show. I tried modeling a new-style Basestar a while ago, though I shelved it due to a lack of solid reference material. I’ve thought about revisiting it now that I have the game model, which is about as close reference as I’m going to get without getting the original, but it’s fairly far down the list.