Hmmm... I'll give it a try... I don't expect much if I can't even begin to use it or be comfortable using it though... we'll see

Well, I should have been more specific.

I assumed since you were asking about modeling on the Sins forum that you want to model for Sins. So if you want to model for Sins you will need XSI. Model with any program that can export to XSI.

Most any program you can change the Quick Keys or mouse buttons in the options.

Wings 3d Export Formats

• Nendo (NDO)
• 3D Studio (3DS)
• Wavefront (OBJ)
• Lightwave/Modo
• VRML (WRL)
• Renderware (RWX)
• FBX (on Windows and Mac OS X)
• Yafray
• Povray
• Kerkythea
• Collada

I am fairly sure that people are using .OBJ to import to XSI

Like I said, you should be able to set the mouse buttons to any keys you want with keybinds or keymapping. You can finish your model with Wings the export model as .OBJ and import to XSI.

Modding_XSItoSins_ModdingSupplement.pdf‎

This will help start getting your model into sins. From here we need an experienced modeler. 

VIEW | AUTO ROTATE (u)
This will fly your camera around the model, so that it appears to rotate. The angle and speed of rotation can be set via the Edit -> Preferences menu. Rotating gives you a good overall view of the model, and can be used in conjunction with screen capture software to create an AVI to show off your model. Pressing any key will stop the rotation. However, you can change the aspect of the camera with the middle mouse button during rotation and the rotation will continue.

If your mouse is like mine, the mouse middle is now left-right. I set 1 of these to Mouse Button2 in the mouse properties.

In XSI you also have to hold a key to rotate but can be changed in the key mapping.

If you are looking for something cheap, but effective try ether blender, or Milkshape 3d. AFAIK Blender is free. Milkshape is shareware for 30 days, but very cheap to activate. Nether of them have a very high learning curve.

I wouldnt give up on max just yet. Sure learning the UI can be a pain but it is worth it in the end. Max for me at least is the most user friendly of the "professional" 3d modeling programs. No hot keys need to memorized.

And as a thanks for the help I got I'll share some pics of the WIP model enjoy... I need to take some updated pics of it as I've done a little more work on the ship now

http://img155.imageshack.us/i/radiance5.jpg/

http://img42.imageshack.us/i/radiance4.jpg/

http://img339.imageshack.us/i/radiance3.jpg/

http://img155.imageshack.us/i/radiance2.jpg/

http://img532.imageshack.us/i/radiance.jpg/

http://img192.imageshack.us/i/radiance6.jpg/

Hmm I'll maybe look into gmax again then... and since I can import the model to it, it should be easy to have it make more detail... but the model so far that I've done is around maybe 40 to 50% complete. I'm still trying to get the weapon hard points made out on it. You know the turrets an all.

Very interesting model... looks like you took the Vasari's phase missile spammer, the Battleship and the carrier and mashed it together into one ship. As with my model I've tried my best to not make any mistakes or have any lines in the model I've actually made that model from a single rectangle and manged to just make it more complex without any errors... though no doubt there might be some errors I have made on it. I just hope they aren't so great that I have to scrap the model and start all over again. I have of course two saves for the model... the original for when I didn't do a lot of detailed work and then there is the current detailed model

Yeah, currently I've updated my model a bit by being able to finally... FINALLY figuring out where I was gonna put turrets and making them out. Only thing I might have a hard time doing is making some finite details on the ship which at this point might be beyond my skill at the moment.

Also the size of this ship is beyond a titan class as I had it planned it's more around a Leviathan class... if you think of it as an in game unit for Sin's it would be a 1 limit ship... means you can only build one of them because it would basically be a beefed up moble starbase that can phase jump between systems and you wouldn't want to meet this sucker on the battle field because it boasts some powerful weapons.

If you notice the nose of the ship looks sorta like a maw/mouth that is the main feature of the ship. A powerful weapon of mass destruction though it would have to be used as a ability with a huge cool down time since it is such a powerful weapon and would take a mass amount of energy to use. As for the rest of the ship's weapons... I don't have any pics at the moment with the current updated look with the turrets but there are a fair amount of cannons on it. Most of them could possibly be beam based weapons or even pulsed energy based weapons, like a large scale pulse laser or even the vasari like version of it. The other turrets I have yet to do will be smaller based weapons which will be on the sides of the ship near the front, front middle and near the rear end of the ship near the main engines

Indeed, From what i see there is nothing wrong with the model as far as i can tell without looking at it in max.

When it comes time to texture like what SivCorp said, Break the model down into as many groups as possible and texture one section at a time. Be careful Sins doesnt like mirrored sections, or multiple sections using the same UV coordinates. As you saw SivCorp with the trade ships. Each section of the mesh had its own texture, and UV. Which explains why the trade ship textures themselves were so large.

That's a definite on the population... heck I might even have a pop count of 2 or even 3 capital points. As I stated before on the ships weapons here are the 3 choices I've made for weapon types.

Beam cannon turrets

fast firing pulse laser/plasma

Torpedo/missile launchers

also here is some tidbit about this ship:

The ship is actually from a book I've been working on but I won't go into detail with that. What I wanted to state in this was the main scale weapon feature on the ship. The nose or mouth part of the ship houses a large scale cannon that has a converter running throughout the center of the ship towards the main reactor and several other sub generators. It is known as a phase transfer singularity cannon.

It takes energy from the phase or hyper space variation of travel ships use but it also multiplies the energy contents of this energy until it reaches a certain point. The sub generators are actually the phase transfer generators that get the energy and charge it up while the main generator provides the main source of energy. It states that it is a singularity cannon so one thinks. "So wait it can make singularity's?" in a sense yes.

The four points at the front of the ship called the maw or mouth are not just for show, the 4 points also hold 4 powerful gravity generators which are linked and compress the beam of the cannon to a point where you get a reaction in the form of a small scale singularity. When the beam is then fired it travels to it's target which can be a point in space or even a ship and once it reaches it's target creates the singularity. But here is where the real damaging part of the reaction comes into play.

The singularity is so unstable that it only lasts for a few seconds before collapsing back on itself and creating a powerful explosion of energy and sends out a shock wave. So any ship near the vincinty of the weapon going off at the point it was fired at are in the danger zone, the closer you are to the terminal point of impact the more likely your ship is going to be destroyed or damaged.

There are two variation of this weapon 1 is the fleet buster and the second is the large scale attack method of the weapon. The weapon can be limited by percentile of how great the damage you want to do so a fleet scale attack would range from anything from 1% to 20% while a system wide attack would range from 21% to 50% for larger scale attacks like say close to 1 light year up to 5 light years would be the rest of the percentage of the max you can go. It's called a WMD for good reason. Though another point comes up would the ship that fired the weapon also get caught up in the large scale destruction? Not really those phase generators also serve another purpose on the ship, the phase the ship out of normal space and put it into a different kind of space that prevents the destructive energy from damaging it.

So basically if it was used in Sins as a ship it main feature the Phase Transfer Singularity Cannon would only be used in two forms, fleet attack and system/planetary attack. But I'd think only to use it for fleet attack because anything larger then fleet attack would simply be overkill and make fighting against such a ship near impossible and worry not I do plan on other race factions and their ability to live through an attack such as that are already taken into thought. If I did make a mod for sins I'd have to take fairness and balance into effect

It is the tangents. If you look at the 3rd party SoA 2 models many of them have mirrored sections and they stand out. Some with very nasty visible texture boundrys. This is because one half of the model was textured then the other side was just cloned and mirrored. On Sins models every section has its own uv coordinate, and texture. Nothing is mirrored.

Hi all, back again with sort of a request. Can I have a experienced modeler look at The model I worked on to sort of well... I don't know suggest anything and to check for mistakes if I made any? If anyone is interested drop me a PM with your E-mail and I'll send the file over for the person to look at.