Gaia is an ambitious mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, in the process revealing the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Gaia will provide unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about one billion stars in our Galaxy and throughout the Local Group. This amounts to about 1 per cent of the Galactic stellar population.

Above is a rendering created to show the spacecraft in its mission phase. I rendered this image in Maxwell and composited it in After Effects. The image was originally 2400 x 1800, and looks much better at that size.

A close up view without the post processing work.

Another close up view without the post processing work.

I modeled the observatory in 3ds Max, which required over 80 hours of work and attention to detail. Here are an array of ambient occlusive renderings that show off the modeling details.

An edged faces shader rendered in V-Ray.

Another edged faced shader rendered in V-Ray.