There is a Minecraft video making its way around the Internet. In it, you see the side of a wall, and hear a man's voice explaining your position at the bottom of a huge well. Then the camera turns and you see the immense body of the starship Enterprise, created using blocks in Minecraft. It's breathtaking. "The D was 'my Enterprise.' It was the one I grew up watching on TV," its creator, Joshua Walker, told Ars. It was always his dream to one day create a 1:1 scale model of the ship, and using the game he was finally able to realize that dream (albeit virtually).

Then Felicia Day tweeted about it, and the gaming blogs picked up the story. Now the video of that enormous ship is all over the Internet. Here's how it was made.

It wasn't supposed to be a big deal

"The thing is, I didn't mean for this to get that popular. It was just a silly weekend project. I made the video to show off what I considered a silly amusement in the Penny Arcade forums, and then went to bed." By the time he woke up, the video had spread like wildfire. "I think also it's the fact it just the frame of the ship that sparks the imagination. It would probably have just been another Enterprise model if I skinned it." He has a point, the skeleton of the ship is amazing to see, and it shows how much work and design went into its creation. This isn't just a 3D model—it has structure, and internal supports.

It helps that Walker has been studying the design of the Enterprise for a long time. "In order to learn how to use Google Sketchup, I decided to make the Enterprise-D in that first," he told Ars. "Sadly, my hard drive blew and I lost six months of work. The only thing I had was my original framework and it was just too painful to start over. One of the things that was not lost was the deck plans that were in a nice computer-friendly vector format."

How it was done

He used the plans created by Ed Whitefire, who was commissioned to create the original plans before being replaced by Mike Okuda. Whitefire's plans are available online, and Walker used those as a reference.

"I originally took all the decks from the Whitefire plans and layered them in Gimp. I then re-sized the plans to a 1 pixel = 1 meter scale." He then reduced each deck to a two-color bitmap exported as a layer, which he considers the most tedious part of the project. "After that, the level editor for Minecraft sucked up each layer and spit out what you saw. When I wandered around on the ship for the first time, I was so pleased it worked out so well."

There has also been some skepticism about how the ship was constructed. Is this a fake? "If they mean fake by 'I didn't lay down every block' well, yes, I used a computer to help, but it's just a tool," Walker explained. "I just applied a little ingenuity to make what I did. If it seems cheap, well, it was something I whipped up for fun. I didn't mean for it to blow up and get scrutinized by people from around the world."

Walker has the right attitude about his project, and the creativity and fun behind it. "Keep in mind, good computer art is not billions and billions of polygons, but how good you can make something look with the limited tools and resources at your disposal," he told Ars. Indeed.

Joshua Walker, we salute you. You made something awesome, and now you're Internet famous.