Hi there!  The chances are you found this page by Googling for "VSS Enterprise".  Back in October, 2004 when SpaceShipOne won the Ansari X-Prize with it's historical manned, private flight into Space, I was moved to create an animation - specifically, a similar vessel departing from Heathrow Airport and launching on a column of flame.

Doing that animation eventually led me to getting in touch with Jeff Rutan, a sterling 3D modeller whose dad had designed and built SpaceShipOne, the legendary Burt Rutan.  Jeff and I became friends, and so when his dad's birthday rolled around a couple of years later he asked if I'd collaborate with him on an animation of SpaceShipTwo (VSS Enterprise) and WhiteKnightTwo (VMS Eve).  We decided that visualising a launch into the Aurora Borealis would be pretty nifty, and below are some stills from the resulting video. In these stills, the vehicle models are by Jeff, whilst I built most of the environments, set up the animation and effects and rendered it.  It was a 3-day death-march, but an incredible amount of fun and a great prvilege.

 Below that are my orginal "VSS Enterprise" stills, based on SpaceShipOne and WhiteKnightOne, rather than the new designs which rolled out on December 6th, 2009. 

The animations themselves can be seen by following this link here

The paint job is out-of-date, but it is quite a striking design, so these renders kept it.  Thanks for swinging by, and do enjoy the rest of the site!

 

White Knight II / VSS Enterprise


Microsoft/Virgin Galactic.

All 3D work in this shot is my own. Background elements were taken from the Internet, Google Earth and
from NASA archives to place the vehicle over Heathrow Airport.Job duration was six days.