This Absurdly Complex Star Destroyer Model May Be the Most Detailed Ever Created

Along with the Death Star, the Imperial Star Destroyer is perhaps the most iconic spacecraft of the Star Wars universe. The ship’s first appearance, in the original Star Wars, was shot with a 102-inch model created by Industrial Light and Magic; today, of course, the Star Destroyers we see on screen are all computer-generated.

The thing with real-life models—whether they’re for use in films or for sale as merchandise—is that there’s a fundamental limit on how complex they can get. I mean, you can’t ship a 172,340-piece Lego Star Destroyer set. (Although, if Lego ever did ship a 172,340-piece set, it would absolutely be a Star Destroyer, and a sector of the fandom would absolutely shell out for it.)

But anyway, the point is that the real world is constrained by considerations like supply, demand, manufacturing capacity, and, y’know, common sense. By contrast, a 3D model is really only constrained by the question of whether trying to render it might result in your computer catching fire. So long as your computer is powerful enough to handle them, models and projects can be arbitrarily large.

For all their CGI glory, though, it could well be that none of the ever-expanding roster of Star Wars films can lay claim to having depicted the single most detailed Star Destroyer model. No, that title could well go instead to a YouTube video by a self-taught 30-year-old Croatian 3D artist and animator who goes by the name “Skylord Luke,†and it animates the construction of one of these spacefaring leviathans from 172,340 individual components.

Gizmodo reached out to Skylord Luke and asked about the scale of the undertaking. Just how big is this thing?

The answer: very, very big. “In total,†Luke explains, “the model has 452,300,211 vertices and 1,391,192,022 triangles.†The Blender file alone took up 13GB of disk space, although Luke says that with multiple backups and other data, the project occupied close to 200GB. And while polygon count isn’t everything—render time is also impacted by the size of texture files, the complexity of lighting and shader data, and multiple other factors—a project whose triangle count reaches 10 figures is really pushing the limits of non-professional 3D setups. It’d certainly bring my relatively modest Ryzen 5 5500/RTX 3070 setup to its knees, which perhaps explains the fact that, when I received Luke’s answers and exclaimed, “1.3 billion triangles!†out loud, Blender—which I happened to have open on my other monitor—promptly crashed. Who says our computers aren’t listening to us??

Thankfully, the Star Destroyer project makes heavy use of instancing, a technique that allows the creation of multiple identical “instances†of objects. This means that if you have, say, a widget that appears multiple times throughout the ship, the GPU can calculate that piece’s geometry once and reuse those calculations, instead of having to render it from scratch many times over.

Instancing all the copies of the ship’s manifold identical pieces reduced the polycount significantly, meaning that Blender only needed to render 32,077,205 vertices and 94,641,886 triangles. This, it should be noted, is still a lot of data. (Or, as Luke puts it, “Whichever numbers you see, it is absolutely insane.â€) With this much geometry to crunch, rendering each frame took 45 seconds, and rendering the entire timelapse took 206 hours. These screenshots give a sense of just how intricate the model is, with each color representing a separate object:

Our other question about the project is how Luke went about creating the model in the first place. He says that he used canon sources where possible: “There are detailed cross-section images and art [available], both official and from clever fan art.†Ultimately, though, much of the detail comes from Luke’s imagination. “There was still a lot I had to extrapolate myself because of the lack of information and visuals,†he says. He estimates that 70 percent of the model is drawn from official art; the other 30 percent, he says, “is very truthful interpretation and extrapolation.â€

Luke says he’s pretty sure the result is the most detailed Star Destroyer rendering that anyone’s ever made—â€at least in terms of components and interior detail.†He says that the only thing he’s found that’s comparable is the model used for a scene in Rogue One in which two such ships collide, resulting in one getting torn in half. However, he says, “I believe [the filmmakers] just added in generic destruction pieces spewing out of [the destroyed ship].â€

For his next project, he’s turning to the world of Halo: “[My] next big thing will be UNSC Spirit of Fire, a very beloved Halo ship.†And in news that should strike fear into the heart of GPUs everywhere, Luke says that he’s aiming bigger still with this new project: “I fully intend to make it a few times more detailed than the Star Destroyer.â€