[Introduction]

Minbari Nial Heavy Fighter 5-View

Like the Minbari Sharlin Warcruiser, the Nial Heavy Fighter has been a part of the B5 universe from its beginning. Its design is consistent with the rest of the Minbari culture, and besides being very elegant, stylish and organic, it also represents the number 3 through its wings and other detail. 3 is a number of great significance to the Minbari culture, and the many subtle ways it is represented in this model shows how much thought went into the design of these vessels.

Version 1.0, like most of my old models, was created in 1997 and has been used by a huge number of artists since then. Over the time though, its mediocre textures and the proportional inaccuracies stood out too much to leave the model as it was, so I decided to remodel it from scratch after the sketches in the B5 Security Manual, to provide the greatest accuracy. Carefull study of the show made it possible for me to match the original organic textures very closely this time, resulting is Version 2.0 of the model.

[Status]

The Nial is now as close as it will ever get to the show without any new reference material. I consider this project as finished for the future, unless of course, somebody can provide me with high-detail renderings of the original model to enable me to fix the remaining differences. Until then, enjoy it as it is!

[Download]

[Notes]

The model is seperated into different files to enable the easiest texturing, and also make it possible to re-use some parts of it for the Minbari Flyer model without any changes. Due to this the Flyer could be considered as a add-on to this model, but most importantly the download size is severely smaller. You can find a description of the Flyer on its own seperate download page.