1:500 TAV-37B Valkyrie Shuttle Build

The Valkyrie shuttle was a major design inspiration to me as an aviation obsessed child, and I was so excited to learn all about it after watching Avatar back in 2009. Ryan Church, did an incredible job designing it, and I recall gawking at the full page print-out of it in the official Avatar Artbook in the summer of 2010; which was a pivotal moment which inspired me to draw more as a kid. However to my young dismay, there was never a toy or mass-market model made of the shuttle, even to this day. It was forever unobtanium, until now….

I started off with this wonderful model of the the Valkyrie made by Mark Newnham, who I will link below. He did a fantastic job of re-creating the SSTO accurately to how it appears in the film.

I took the 3D data into Blender and made edits to the mesh to make it watertight for 3D printing, and made small changes for print fidelity and optimal resin drain and UV curing.

Fresh off the press!

Looking good

Finished Curing

Primed and base white added.

Time for the tedious masking process.

Starting to paint recesses.

Engine nacelles and heat tiling painted, now to paint the panel lines. I made custom decals in illustrator for the smallest details and logographics, but I painted the rest of the details by hand.

All complete! The workhorse of the RDA!

Super happy how all the small details came out.

Up-close beauty shot!

Kept the gear up version in bare resin for fun to put things in perspective.

Shows how well the details came out.

Fusion engines and turbojets!

Scale with other 1:500 aircraft.

It’s a behemoth! Dwarfs the Beluga XL and 747-400!