However, as supervisor Bruce Branit of Digital Muse explained, referring to DS9: "Sacrifice of Angels", sometimes the effort of transferring CG-files to another software format was worthwhile:
"It was the first time that anyone had actually assembled the entire Starfleet fleet in CG. Normally there were always a few ships they used for CG, and they pulled models out, and did motion control. Due to the nature of the show, there was no way they could do it with motion control. There was not enough time and not enough money. They were talking about having fifty to a hundred Starfleet vessels on screen at one time, and there was no way to pull that off in traditional ways. So we were a collecting point for anything that had been done in CG before. We brought the digital models in and converted them to LightWave, which is our rendering package of choice. The Enterprise-D had been done before, but in something else, so we were able to bring the geometry in, and bring some of the maps in, but we had to rebuild it. We had all the ingredients, so we could put it together much more quickly than building it from scratch. So now we have folders with the entire fleet all lined up in the same form, so we can just load a Reliant, we can load a Defiant, we can load an Excelsior, whenever we need it. That was the first real challenge, to get all that stuff in order, and to fill the garage with useable ships." (Cinefantastique, Vol.30, No.9/10, page 64)
Tackling the ILM models, done for "Star Trek Generations" and "Star Trek: First Contact", in an early stage, Digital Muse was able to showcase the upgraded versions already in DS9: "Call to Arms".
