[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
But the stills that were published in magazines had plenty of texture – that’s why they looked so realistic! I don’t know if they dispensed with textures for the moving scenes (hard to believe), or if some feature of moving ships made them look unrealistic. But the still shots of the Starfighters and the X-wings they did looked photorealistic.
[/QUOTE]
It’s probable that textures were not mapped by the hardware and thus had to be simplified to work at a reasonable rendering speed (i.e. it doesn’t matter if it looks great if it takes a month to render a scene). It’s amusing that what took Big Aluminum back then could be done much better with an average desktop today.
If you want to see the direct [spiritual] descendant of TLS’s effects, check out Babylon 5. If the people who did the latter weren’t fans of the former, it’s gotta be one of the biggest coincidences in moviedom.