I tried the trial recently and I liked it enough to subscribe to here I am. I've done 3d work in the past for the Evolutions Mod for Freelancer and I was looking for info on designing ships for this game.

The link to the ship creation guide on the Wiki page is no good however so I was hoping for someone could point me in the right direction. What I'm looking for in particular is info on the poly limits on ship meshes and also the kind of bump mapping used by the 3d engine.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Here's a link to a gallery of my past work: http://my.att.net/p/s/community.dll?ep=330&groupID=307041&folderview=&ck=

you can edit yer post! just look around, anywho I really like your work. :)

Doh! That's what I get for posting at 2AM :)

It's fixed now cheers!

Generally, devs aren't putting player made ships into the game, as there are some issues with it.
Specifically, some legal stuff, the fact that it takes some work to get ship to work in vo that goes beyond making the model and texturing it, and that there are only 4 devs and they have tons of other things to do.
(i'm not a dev tho, so don't take this as anything official >.>)

That being said, feel free to make something, if anything would be fun to see it :)
There also have been two (or more?) design-a-ship contests, tho as i said nothing of it made it into the game.
Still, you might want to take a look:
2nd Generation "Design-A-Ship" Contest

I think you guys are also missing out on a huge part of the game "balance" with ship designs SHAPE. the ship shape is very important there is a reason the vulture has this big ass wings on it and a centurion is kinda fat but still hard to hit.

There's that too.

Those ships he made are awesome.

I see alot of those ships seem very similar to the Warthog or the Centaur.

I can see that there would be a resemblance to the Warthog in some of my as it is a very common layout. There's a similar design in almost every space combat game out there.

The Centaur however I don't see in any of my work.

I haven't done any 3d work in a while so I'm going to work on some original designs for the major factions in VO anyway just to get back in the groove if nothing else.

While I would like to see more ships in this game, and those are some spiffy designs you've got there, I don't see any new ones coming any time soon.

Uh, no, actually those are pretty terrible. The best that can be said for them is that they are a step above the ones in the design-a-wreck contests.

They are very much reminiscent of the Wing Commander single-seaters (some are direct copies, which is fair, but the others seem very much inspired).

The banshee in the first 3 pics is the only one directly copied from Wing Commander. A few others are inspired by Homeworld design sketches and various artists who I credited in the comments.

I you look at space sim games and movies you'll find common design elements in all of them....it's inevitable.

@ genka - These models were made for Freelancer so none would fit into VO. That said...I'm glad that they don't suck completely :)

Maybe if we got rid of the 1996-era ship designs we would get less threads like this.

I guess everything that Luis didn't do plus the Valk/Prom/Marauder needs a serious polygons/art/etc. upgrade.

I mean, people see the Centaur or Centurion and go... "WTF I could have come up with this design in 20 minutes!" And they probably could have. Programming the collision meshes and bump maps and whatnot would of course take a while, but the general concept of some of the ships is admittedly weak.

I liked the line the "new" Teradon, Constellation, Raptor, EC-89 and others were taking. They look pretty damn nice. Now if we could just extrapolate...

If we could get someone here working full time for Guild, I could see more ships happening.
Now that being said, I don't know how well Guild could pay that person, but its something to think about. I know a few companies who hire their community members.

I'm hoping someone for the dev team will reply to this thread. I have a few designs in mind for the three main factions but I need to know what the poly limit on ship models are.

Most of ships I made are under 3k polys but the ones currently in-game look a good deal lower than that.......I could be mistaken though.

Look at the newest ones as Leber said: EC's, Revenant, Raptor, and capships: Teradon, Constallation.
And don't worry that most of the ships seem to have very low poly count, i think vo could handle bit more.
But still you aren't the first coming and saying 'i have few ideas' and asking about technical stuff. Not to discourage.

As said previously, if you were willing to sign an NDA, ask Guild for the stuff to finish designing a few ships, and actually GOT the stuff, that would be a miracle. Even only one new design per faction would be heavenly!

Looking at those ships (EC, revenant etc.) you can see that they all have a common design theme and texture style.

What I would like to see is a unique design theme for each nation and maybe a few fighters for pirates as well. The current vessels would remain as common 'corporate' designs available everywhere. For example all those ships above could be assigned to the UIT faction and other lines of vessels (with common design themes) for the other nations. What I envision is the Itani having fluid sleek designs and the Serco having a bulkier squarer look.

This is not the first time I've produced models for a game, granted it was for mods and not directly for a retail product, but I always focused on producing a smaller number of quality models as opposed to the opposite.

In terms of design there are aspects of this game that are frankly not as polished as one would expect from a retail product but given the size of the dev team that's understandable. I'm not looking for a job here (though I'd be lying if I said that I had no interest in one) I enjoy playing VO and I see areas where it can be better and feel I have the skills to help.

The purpose of this thread was to show my past work and get some info to help me with new designs tailored specifically for VO. I have to sign an NDA to that I have no problems with it. Ultimately I enjoy 3d modeling and if my designs aren't used it won't diminish the pleasure I get from making them. If nothing else this will a cool project to work on and more material to add to my portfolio.

Panther, these look really cool! I would love to hear some feedback from the devs on this, and possibly get some of these into the game!

-Calder

Calder I'm glad you like them but unfortunately many of those designs either contain or are based on others' IP so there's no way they can be added to VO.