Originally posted by: focuspuller

Actually I had an idea about that, what about a cheat? ... what if the Deathstar is a digital mat painting? I don't see why that wouldn't work.

I suppose one could render just three frames of the modeled surface and stitch them together for a map, then place that map onto a simple plane of the right shape, and the "animation" then would take a brief amount of time as it's only rendering a simple textured plane/disk rather than all the details each frame. My problem is just getting that initial rendering of the DS surface set-up. I don't even have LW versions of the tiles!