Nashville, Tennessee-based visual effects artist Isaac Botkin used LightWave 3D to cleverly imagine a timelapse of the construction of the original Death Star space station/superweapon that was seen in the first Star Wars film, Star Wars: A New Hope, and more recently in Rogue One: A Star Wars story. Isaac’s brother, Ben Botkin, composed an original score for the timelapse.
“This is a personal project that I worked on with my brother. I enjoyed watching a little bit of Death Star assembly in Rogue One, but I wanted to see more. I came up with a very simple method of revealing geometry with Lightwave’s instancing tool, and then started building the underlying parts of the fully armed and operational battle station. Since there was a lot of procedural animation, I was seeing a lot of interesting shapes appear that I hadn’t planned, but the thing that really pulls it together is the new score by Ben Botkin.”