The White Star was always meant to be semi-organic - so I took that fact and developed some new materials based around the same principles used for rendering skin. The intention was to give the White Star a respectful upgrade, bringing that iconic design into the realm of modern materials and rendering.
Using Quadspinner's Gaea suite, I took the pre-existing textures and essentially treated them like terrain. They were eroded to form rivers that might resemble veins and other organic structures.
The maps from Gaea were used to drive the Subsurface Scattering, and an emissive mesh extruded within the main hull to give the impression of sub-surface veins and inner glow.
Mesh credit: Chris Kuhn