Sooo I'm pretty new, just subscribed and stuff because the game seems to have gobs of potential. But one of the first things I said when I was playing was something ike "some of these ship models aren't too impressive." and I started talking with people in the game and they mentioned how the devs are realy people and they might use a player made model.
There was also things siad about how people have made models, but they were never used.
Then a retort on that by another person of "But where any of them any good?" followed by some lol's.

I looked through the wiki and say some player made models and.. yeah, I see, most done in wings 3d and all. So I thought I'd take a shot at modeling something good enough.
I haven't skinned it because unwrapping is a pain and if it was used I dont' know what I might need to change, or if they like my modeling but would want a different design, etc. since there would be alot of work going into finishing it I'd rather show this first D:. I am a (2d)graphics artist for a living though, so I CAN skin it.

Anyways, here is renders. They are cruddy simple renders, but show what the model looks like more than a bunch of fancy lighting, rendering, and post processing would.

It is around 1,000 triangles, made in 3dsmax.
http://img179.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=54062_bship1_122_548lo.jpg
http://img19.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=54063_bship2_122_1043lo.jpg

Nice. I won't hold out too much hope for the player-made models making it into the game, but the ship model looks cool.

There's a giant thread of player-made ship models somewhere.
Here's the Mk. II version:
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/1/13137

i want to see a frigate like this that would have a pair of heavy missiles launchers errr something like that

and another thing GODDAMN that reminds me of the heavy missile frigate in homeworld 2

i think everything with missiles reminds you of homeworld 2 spidey

that reminds me we dont have a need for yet another galaxy scale paper weight.

no really this entry is the one i would see actually implemented into Vo as a capital class ship it just needs a bit of texturing and that thing would look like a nice command vessel or something like that its beautiful i love it keep up the good work ;)

I really just made it to show ability.(as oppose dto making it to be put into the game)
I can make fighters and frigates.
Maybe i'll model a fighter next weekend.

Very nice. I really wish the devs would accept submissions like these, even if they had to mail you some paperwork to sign or something. I don't see why they don't.

i didn't mean to say it wasn't a nice model.

just that another [useless] cappy is not what we need atm.

given we're as close to having cappies at our disposal as nasa is to fart out diamonds out of space dust, it would be nice to have, perhaps, different models for ship variants.

i think it's sad that svg looks like like corvus' variant.

and we still need to fix the valk. the x1 thing is just a test best for a slimmer valk. how about we give it a model now?

Yeah I was thinking that when i was modeling it. But I was thinking that making a nice battleship model will look nicer than a nice fighter one. :P

Hm..I don´t really like the model. Yes its nice but not for a ship. It doesnt look like a ship at all. It seems to be a good gun-model. (by the way, why does almost every hobby-spaceship-modeler thinks that a spaceship has to look like a futuristic gun???)

Another note: I worked as a 3D-Modeler in the Game-Industry for about 6 years. There are much more things to do and to pay attention to, than just "I model and skin, and you use it"

For example:
Model:
-Center Point
-Measurements
-Coordinates
-Type of geometry
-Helper-Objects

Texture/Materials:
-Format
-Size
-Materials
-Quantity
-Type
-Helper Materials

and so on...

I liked the model, personally, though I've been known to complain about ships looking like guns myself:) As object says, though, there is much more to making a usable game-asset than modeling or even uv-mapping and texturing (which is much more time consuming than modeling, and much harder to do *well*). Our ships all have 'helper-objects' for exhaust, weapon-emitters and more; specular, illumination and normal maps; collision-meshes; and probably a dozen other things that I'm not aware of, having never gone all the way through the process myself. For any new artist to contribute a ship to our game, even someone with previous game-industry experience, they would need a lot of John's time. It's a serious investment that isn't worth making unless the artist in question will be contributing a lot more than one or two models. We actually have a number of ships that Luis took to various degrees of completion, but even these will take at least 10 hours of John's time *each*.

10 hours each, eh?
Better tell John to get crackin'! >:P

but this is damn close to the rifle in halo.

well done though, master chief. looks good!

I thought it was more a Pillar of Autumn in the beginning. Note I said BEGINNING, one of his early versions of this model :)

But in all seriousness, might ship models be another area to "Streamline" one day, to make the process easier. Yes, one day, as I doubt it'd a priority atm.

object-
Yeah It does look a bit like a gun. And I think alot of people make battleships that are gun-esque because guns look dangerous.
I mean like I said. I just wanted to model something neat looking to show ability, rather than model something for the game.

momerath42-
I figured this to be the case. I used to follow the UT, Quake, And Half Life mod scenes and made a few small contributions to some mods, so I figured there would need to be helper-objects placed at the exhaust, where weapons fire, maybe even spots for where blinking lights would be and things like that.

And making normal maps and specular maps isn't a problem.

And if you do like the quality of the modeling I could make enough to replace at least one races ships and I really want to replace all the AI ships models, because that is what players are looking at a whole lot of the time since it's what they're killing. I figure I can make one to two a week because I work 30-45 hours a week.
I'd especially want to replace them to look like organic-mechanical ships.. that's just what the whole hive thing springs to mind when I've read it, but I honestly don't know how the story is supposed to be. It'd be especially cool if the ships exploded all bloodily when you killed them. >_> I'd especially liek to model them organic looking because then I could use ZBrush for the normal maps, which is so fanastic for organic high-poly modeling.

I'm working on what I invision a medium sized Itani sighter to look like after I finish up some work for my job.

front: http://img40.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=58263_ship1_122_845lo.jpg
back: http://img108.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=58267_ship2_122_893lo.jpg
side: http://img165.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=58798_ship3_122_504lo.jpg

Here it is, 90% finished(need to shape some areas better, like the wing part that wraps around infront of the engine housing). And at 1303triangles, i went a bit overboard on the polycount. >_>
Though I could reduce the polies down a few ways.

I heard the devs had interns.

...

Follow that train of thought.

That new fighter is really cool, innociv. It's definitely worth 10 hours of Incarnate's time.

Um, taking a baseline model and making it ready for the game is not a 10-hour thing, by any stretch. Michael used the phrase "at least", because he's never done it and wasn't really sure :). He's also making references to Luis's ships where most of the work was already done to spec, but last I looked at them they all needed quite a bit of work. And I spent literally months training Luis. In fact, I probably spent about a man-month total, just on training him, so that's what.. about 160 hours?

To recap for new people: We're always grateful that people want to help add stuff, but ship models do not help us, they do not save us time. 98% of content development time is spent in texture coordinates, map design, shader tweaking and the like. Making a neat low-poly model takes maybe an hour for someone experienced, from scratch. The rest of the BS takes another 40 hours. You can cut corners, of course, re-using elements between textures and so on, but it's time consuming work regardless, and there are usually a lot of revisions. And that's just the graphical work, then you get into the game-content work.

Also, for anyone else who was unclear, this is not an unskilled job. I spent a great deal of time training Luis, and he had already worked as a full-time game developer on a 3D MMO and knew a great deal. If I spent the necessary time to train an intern, or whomever, on how to do everything.. well, I wouldn't have the time to do all my other work (like say, writing faction stuff), which I'm having enough trouble getting done as it is. It's a catch-22 of resource allocation.

So, to boil it down, we welcome people playing around with content creation and asking us about it. I would link to the Wiki thing I made, describing a lot of it, if the old design-wiki wasn't broken right now. But anyway, we welcome people wanting to be involved and doing stuff, but we do not want to raise anyone's expectations about our actually using their work. It's not an impossibility, but it hasn't happened to date.

Michael was basically trying to make this point, but unfortunately stating any public numbers (like "10 hours") is a bad idea. People tend to latch onto the number and try to apply it to everything, which is usually not accurate or even meaningful. For instance, I spent hours and hours just cleaning up Luis's meshes, because they invariably had floating vertices, strange lighting normals and unusual polygon boundaries that would propagate through into the shaders; not even getting into his odd normal maps, OBB (collision) hulls and so on. And I would go back and forth with him about this stuff, and he would get better, but even his latest work still has these problems. Content creation tends to be a case-by-case thing, and the only time you can really make a judgement of how long something will take.. is when someone experienced has been working with you, in your engine, on your game, using your tools, for quite a long time (a year or two). It is often less time consuming to create something *completely new*, yourself, than it is to fix something made by someone else and explain why their work was broken. This seems strange to non-game-developers, and not strange at all to people who have been there :).

This is why, although we think the idea is cool, we don't really have any great expectations of user-contributed content in the short term. It would require a great dedication of time both for the contributing individual as well as the developer (pretty much just me at this point) who would help them. And then, after spending all that time to learn how, they might well decide it wasn't for them and leave. In some sort of vague "long-run", I'd like to make tools and documentation publicly available and just let people go nuts, to see what they create. But beyond the little thing I wrote for the now-broken design wiki, I don't have the time to put into writing documentation, nor do we have the developer resources to put into making our very arcane/undocumented toolset (which all depend on very expensive programs) any easier for people to use.

So, yeah, that's sort of the realistic sense of it, as best I can say. Hope that helps. Don't want to discourage anyone from playing around, but don't want to create unreasonable expectations either :).