This is, admittedly, a secondhand query, but one that I think I will recognize on seeing it and seeing Early '90s CGI short film about insects living inside a computer answered made be bold enough to think someone might have an answer to this one. In the early 1990s, my brother went to a computer show, and came back describing an animation he'd seen demonstrated. The early part of the animation showed a fighter jet wending its way through canyons, flying in a very nap of the Earth fashion, with the end of the animation having a spacecraft rising off of a cliff wall and firing a shot that took the fighter jet down. I remember distinctly what he made the point that the spacecraft was not cloaked or otherwise invisible, but just painted in such a way that it blended perfectly with the background such that you didn't see it until it fired.

Part of me wants to say that he explicitly called out 3D Studio as having been used to make the video, but I could just be thinking about that in the context of that it was the accepted 3D software at the time.

In retrospect, it seems that a fighter jet would be travelling too fast for it to make narrative sense for a stationary camouflaged ship and the jet to be in the same frame for more than a second, but I could see it either being that sort of a split-second thing (spaceship rises off of the surface and fires as the jet is passing by, just leaving flaming wreckage) or if perhaps it were handled in a more cinematic scene, cutting between the flying jet, the spaceship rising and firing, and the jet being destroyed midflight.

And honestly, I don't know if my brother specifically mentioned it being a Klingon or Romulan vessel, or if I just assumed it based on him talking about the spaceship not being "cloaked", Star Trek being a very popular show for us at the time. My brother does not remember this story, so he hasn't been much help tracking this down.

This is, admittedly, a secondhand query, but one that I think I will recognize on seeing it and seeing Early '90s CGI short film about insects living inside a computer answered made me bold enough to think someone might have an answer to this one. In the early 1990s, my brother went to a computer show, and came back describing an animation he'd seen demonstrated. The early part of the animation showed a fighter jet wending its way through canyons, flying in a very nap of the Earth fashion, with the end of the animation having a spacecraft rising off of a cliff wall and firing a shot that took the fighter jet down. I remember distinctly what he made the point that the spacecraft was not cloaked or otherwise invisible, but just painted in such a way that it blended perfectly with the background such that you didn't see it until it fired.

Part of me wants to say that he explicitly called out 3D Studio as having been used to make the video, but I could just be thinking about that in the context of that it was the accepted 3D software at the time.

In retrospect, it seems that a fighter jet would be travelling too fast for it to make narrative sense for a stationary camouflaged ship and the jet to be in the same frame for more than a second, but I could see it either being that sort of a split-second thing (spaceship rises off of the surface and fires as the jet is passing by, just leaving flaming wreckage) or if perhaps it were handled in a more cinematic scene, cutting between the flying jet, the spaceship rising and firing, and the jet being destroyed midflight.

And honestly, I don't know if my brother specifically mentioned it being a Klingon or Romulan vessel, or if I just assumed it based on him talking about the spaceship not being "cloaked", Star Trek being a very popular show for us at the time. My brother does not remember this story, so he hasn't been much help tracking this down.