First I made a simple box and moved the points to look something like a space ship.

I then Beveled the two rear polygon with suitable inset and shift a few times to make it look like engines.

Some panels on the top sides for sun panels and a new platform for living quarters were beveled and moved into suitable places.

The control tower was made by a beveling a simple rectangular polygon and moving the points to get the shape.

I then beveled the front polygon inwards to make a hangar.

To make the doors on the inner polygon i Solid Drilled (sliced) it with three boxes. It turned out whacked though, so i saved the points and remade the polygons. The new door polygons was beveled slightly.

The basic shape was now done, so I went for some details. First some griping cranes. These were made by simple shapes. Discs, balls, and rotated/stretched boxes for the grip.

The cranes was then copied to suitable position on the hull. They were then rotated to different position to make them look active.

Since I not yet had improvised the scene setup of the objects, I made some details for the bottom side in substitute to the top control tower.

It was made by cutting a simple sphere in half, extruding the crossing polygons and removing the rest. I made a simple beveled disc in the middle.

I then started with the textures on the front hangar. All image map textures are made in Photoshop. The color texture for the door is a simple fill+text-image made slighty worn with a black/white low opacity multiplied layer on top of them. The specularity/bump are is the overlaying layer mentioned above, but with adjusted contrast and some blur.

The walls textures are Grid procedurals on color and luminosity. To make them look like wall lights they have 0% diffuse and 100% luminosity.

The floor and ceiling is slightly reflecting textures, with some minor bump procedurals to make it look worn, but very clean.

The cranes textures was made completely with procedurals. The yellow links got some medium specularity/glossiness and a bump map (Can't access LW due to rendering, but I think I ended up with a Honeycomb pattern).

The cranes pipes got some crust bump map to make it look worn. The bump texture was copied to color, specularity and diffuse to give it more effect.

For the panels, i made the color texture in Photoshop with some Clouds/Blur and textured it to Bricks.

The reflection texture is the color map, but blurred. The bump was a raised intensity/contrast version of the color. Fitted on place these were fitted to place and made discreet to avoid making it to ray tracing shiny.

The hull was textured with a planar image map on the Y-axis.

The colors, made in Photoshop, some simple blurred clouds, with some clouded rectangles added on a layer. The specularity map was a slightly contrasted version of the color.

The bump map was some high contrasted brush strokes, adjusted into shape on a overlaying layer.

I also added glow to the control towers windows.

I wanted to add some details to the empty sides, so i went back to Modeler.

I copied out the 2 sides polygons and Subdivided them to increase the polys and merged some of them together to make them square. I then copied the points and made two curves. I then made small discs and use the curve to Rail Extrude them into pipes.

The pipes was then textured with procedurals, similar to the previous textures. I tried to make them more "foily" and worn.

The planet model was made from a simple Ball (Tessalation). The ball isn't completely spherical, to make it less fabricated.

The rings were made with the Wedge-tool. And then rezised to a flat shape.

For color, I made a some brush strokes in Photoshop and cut out a 1px wide column to wrap around the sphere as a image map. In Lightwave Surface Editor, I also added som Turbulence on a texture displacing layer above the color map. I then adjusted the texture and copied it to the specularity also.

I wrapped the texture around the rings as well and adjusted transparency to make it discreet.

Instead of making the stars in Photoshop, i decided to make use of Lightwave. I made Star Sphere with about 20000 points, converted to polys. I then rotated the half of the star sphere 180 to get more stars in the visible field.

I then made a simple and discreet dark red cloud, twisted, in Photoshop for the background.

I then changed the luminosity on the stars to random values and added some slight glowing.

(the big red dots are lens flares of some point lights on the ship that added later)

The objects was then lined up. The ship's in the middle. The planet and stars were re-sized and a bright sun was added. The ambient light was reduced to 0%.

To add some life to the scene i quickly made some small light weight explorers. These were made similar as the main ship - boxes, adjusted points, and bevel to a suitable shape (see first steps). To quickly make the explorers rounder then the edgy ship i simply Sub Patched the low poly model (you can see the basic unpatched shape at the yellow borders on the image).

The ship was then added and cloned to the scene. The texture are stretched color, diffuse and bump Procedurals. I added some green glow on the small engines.

The final scene was then set up with some lights. I added the red warning Point Lights at the corners of the ship with some minor Lens Flares.

I also added Ray Traced Spot Lights on to the cranes to make the scene more alive.

For the final render i enabled full AA and Radiosity (complex and time consuming light bouncing).