Damn, your guys' ships are too detailed.  Too many surfaces/faces, they look too good.  It makes me want to just give up on my low detail modelling.

Heavy Fighter-

I don't know how to skin models so I did a quick photoshop of what the fighter should look like colored.

Don't give up! Everybody starts somewhere.

I started off low-poly modeling just extruding the crap out of boxes in maya (previously I modeled in Rhino 3d using nurbs, where I first kitbashed models and then moved on to mass point/vertex editing and mirroring/manipulation of that level, producing insanely high poly models). I ended up with stuff like this;

I moved on from modeling stuff like that to what I'm making right now, and then hit a massive brick wall in progressing my skills and have yet to progress past it for years.

If I was to recommend a place to start, I'd say by abusing extrudes and bevels.

Not sure if I am working up to a robotic or cybernetic race here.

Old Class Destroyer

Added a bump map to my low resolution cyborg frigate and a simple hull texture.

 Sins of the 13th Tribe

Today I decided to tackle the Zelconian for a change. Their complex ship designs and exotic wings are something I have never been able to do before.

Here's the Zelconian Predator, a small 30km third-generation destroyer. I have just finished the base hull and it's ready for guns and detailing. This will end up being higher poly than my other models, it's already clocking in at about 3.8k. I am aiming for 8-9k upon completion.

It's too bad it'll never be skinned.

For my refs, I used a fighter by Khang and the Andromeda. This is the second time I've ever used references. I am very poor at copying references, but I needed to remind myself how I wanted the wing structure to look.

/edit

Finally done. Well, nearly done. There's a few places to patch up and some smoothing to perfect, but else it's pretty solid right now. I'm very proud of myself for achieving this impossible feat.

http://fc02.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2010/030/e/e/Zelconian_Predator_Class_BetaC_by_IskatuMesk.jpg

No comments? No insults? No hysteria?! I am disappointed. Maybe I'll gather some infamy with this 28k poly monstrosity I've been updating!

Yeah! Guns! Needs moar guns yet, but still. 28k poly. My highest poly model by far, largely because of the turrets - which I did optimize. About 70% finished now.

Gorekhan updated. 6.8k poly

Zegredark Hydromek. 6.9k poly, largely because of the SMOOTHNESS ARGH. Smooth models are gonna be higher poly than my other stuff. I can't escape that.

In Sins, 90% of those quads wont be seen (since they will be tris, LOL... bad joke yeah.)

The whole point of per vertex normals is to smooth out lower poly models, your races didn't get the memo.

Very nice though.

Maybe Ill frame one of mine to show you what a crappy low detail model actualy looks like  .

Well, I rendered with zero smoothing on to get an idea of what the lighting will be like in most games. If I could uvw tangents, they'd be a lot smoother in sins, for example. Also, I always render like that to give people an idea of the poly distribution.

Anyways, I'm not just modeling them for sins, but actual CGI, too.

Also, I can't UVW map or texture, so they'll never have proper normal maps.

Also, I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to do some hilarious hardpoint trickery to get all these guns to fire inside Sins, too. Like, using one hardpoint for every two barrels.

Yay another edit

I should point out that the Great Knight is going to be like 6-8x the size of the Kol inside the game. Like, pretty close to the size of a planet.

Yeah, I not really serious about the polys etc, its just that was what everyone cared about in the late 90s. Which is when I learned modeling so its always the first thing I think of.

One particle for all the barrels on a turret actualy improves the look of multi barrel guns anyway, rather than each fire point fireing in sequence, each turret fires instead. Far more 'realistic'.

I always keep an eye on polycounts, anyway. Typically I don't worry about them, but I like to keep various classes of ships around a certain point. 5k for a spammy corvette is a little high, for example. 31k is acceptable for my big ship because it'll be a very large, late-game flagship. I could go for broke with more and more turrets, but that just won't turn out well in sins because of the weapon limit, so at some point I need to stop and just take what I've got and go with it.

Speaking of which, I finished it, except for the engines.

This is one of my models that will suffer massively from non-moving turrets. A pity, since even homeworld 1 had moving turrets.

Holy crap! That looks awesome! Do you mind if I ask why you can't uv map/texture your ships? Don't know how to, don't want to, the software doesn't work, what? Those would look really awesome with textures

I haven't counted the exact number of guns on that thing, but you might not have to do that. The limits for hardpoints in Sins are 20 per weapon per side. So you can have 20 hardpoints for weapon0, 20 for weapon1, and 20 for weapon2 on the right side, and do the same for each side, for a total of 240 weapon hardpoints.

I'd post some of my models here, but the only ones I think are any decent aren't for Sins. Oh well...

I don't know how to and mental illnesses make learning new things, especially complex things, extremely difficult.

Anyways, I counted the forward-facing Quantum-Force cannons and ended up with like 24-26 or something. I guess I could turn some to the side, though.

XSI doesn't seem to work on my version of windows 7 beta so hopefully my buddy will stop being lazy and I can start getting these into the game soon.

Ah, ok. That's sorry to hear.

You could also make 12 of them weapon0 and 12 weapon1 (or whatever numbers you want). Just make them look the same in game. That way you don't have to do any editing of the model.

I had the same problem. I don't know if this will work for you (it worked for me, but it doesn't work for everyone) but try running XSI as the administrator. XSI would crash almost every time I tried to start it, and wouldn't export correctly when it did start, but running as admin fixed it. But like I said, that doesn't seem to work for everyone.

Yeah, unfortunately it's not working. A dos dialogue appears for a split second, the program sits in memory using ~6 megs for a few more seconds, then vanishes.

Le sigh. I have many games and programs that don't work. I only pray that when I buy the full version of windows later this month that this'll be fixed.

I think I have a way to solve the gun problem. I just need the darned model in sins.. *grumbles*

Here is my first model attempt using Google SketchUp.. I cant use any other programs.. too complcated for me haha.. This is nice and simple for me.. Its not really complete as im sure you'll be able to tell. The opening down the middle is a launch pad bay for fighters.. The empty spots in the back will be where the engines go when i model them in and the 2 things around them will be some sort of rotating gun.

Updated another one of my older models.

6.8k poly, may add yet more guns if I feel daring to break my desired polycount for this class.

What programs are you using and does anybody know a program that is easy to understand for a absolut beginner?

Or does anyone have some experience with blender and could give me some hints?

I use 3ds max. I've used it for close to 7-8 years and still have absolutely zero idea what anything past the most basic of functions do.

I HEAR THE CALL OF THE WILD

ON THE PROWL

READY TO TRACK

16.3k poly

  That looks friggin' awesome!!!!!   

Damn good work

What version of max?  I belive max9 and max design and above have an auto uvw unwrap tool to make it easyer to uvw models. It creates a uvw map/texture to paint on texture art. There are other uvw tools like lithunwrap that can help get a uvw on your models for texture work.

I use design 2009.

I'll have a look at the auto unwrap tool but I'm about as competent at making textures as I am at having a social life. Aka, I'm better off driving my face into my desk at half the speed of light while screaming something clever, like "MY WIFE FOR THE HORSE!"

But hey, if it can fix the annoying texture stretching that happens on some parts of my models from the tiling, it'll be an improvement!