You are right, most of us here use Milkshape.
What kind of help do you need? There are plenty of tutorials around here and if you need tutorials about modeling, there are some links on Milkshape's website.

Anyway, here is how I generally proceed :

1. I make a sketch of my ship on paper (I guess you can skip it if you have a really good idea of what your ship will be but I don't advise you to do so...)
2. I make the model in Milkshape from simples shapes (cylinders, cubes, etc...) and sometimes face by face.
3. I start thinking about a texture if I haven't done so when sketching the craft.
4. I make the texture in Photoshop 7 and import it in Milkshape.
5. I read again all the tutorials about importing a ship I consider interesting and I follow them...

I hope this helps you a bit.
If not, don't hesitate to ask (more precise) questions...

Good luck !

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thanks for the help, darkpetzi

i already have a good idea of my ship and ill keep it a secret until it's released.
i've used milkshape before for half-life and my other friend has photoshop 7
so i will keep this in mind.

here's a clue for my ship: it will give the badlands a scary feel .

I use doga to make my ships.The program is easy to use and in skilled hands you could create cool looking ships.

You can get doga from http://www.doga.co.jp/english/
go to download section and get all three parts of doga.


May strong survive and weak perish

Don't you reckon the Badlands are scary enough already?

I'm dying to see how a ship will make a dense black cloud with large, densely-packed black slabs of nondescript matter and sporadic lightning any more freaky than it already is...


The Dude Abides

Well, there are some really nice 3D programs out there.

For low-poly you can use Milkshape 3D

It´s easy to learn and there are some tutorials in the web for MS3D and it doesn´t cost very much.

Then there is Gmax. This program comes from developers of the famous 3D Studio Max. The good things are, that you can download it without any costs from the page and it has nearely all of the features of 3D Studio Max.

But for many people, Gmax is much harder to learn than e.g. MS3D, but don´t give up hope, there are good tutorials out there, too.

Last but not least, the best 3D Program, you´ll probably find on the whole world. I talk about 3D Studio Max. This program is very good for high-poly design. It has all you need and you can buy many applications for 3D Studio Max.

Ok and that´s the negative point. It costs a lot of money (when you buy it...). The newest version costs much more than 1000$.

To all others, who want to say now, that there are much more 3D programs.....sure, there are perhaps much more programs e.g. Maya, but I didn´t test these programs, so I can´t say you anything about them.

Hope this helps you a little bit!


Dryx-Thelon

Edited by - Dryx-Thelon on 21-04-2003 00:31:16

Lightwave 3D seems to be working rather well. I'm having a few issues with getting the textures and HP's correct, but I'm confident that I'll have those worked out in no time.

Gmax is just a free version of 3DSMax with limited options (just what's required for game editing actually and therefore such useless things as lightning, rendering, etc...)
The other limitation of this soft is the exporting format but, fortunately, there are many plug-in available to solve that problem...
But otherwise, it's almost exaclty the same as 3DSMax 4...

Milkshape is still the best in my opinion. Not really an advanced software but perfectly sufficient for what we're doing here (and much easier to use than Gmax, 3DSMax or LW...)

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