Questions, Comments, Help

Hi all. In case you haven't noticed, I am new here and I have some ideas to making new plug-ins.
But, one thing I really want to be able to do is make my own ships. Therefore, I have
put down some of my questions here...

1. How do I actually create a ship to be used in nova?
2. How can I use Wings to do this?
3. How do I texture my ship?
4. How can I make engine glows/ other cool engine effects
5. How do I control where the weapons fire from?

Thanks to all who answer for tolerating my "newness", because I am curious and I have no clue. (ha ha)

(by the way, I'm using Windows, not a mac)

This post has been edited by Star Captain Saber : 16 December 2007 - 05:33 PM

do you have Photoshop or some other photo-editing program?

oh, and can you model already?

@yamfries, on Dec 16 2007, 07:46 PM, said in Wings 3D:

do you have Photoshop or some other photo-editing program?

oh, and can you model already?

I do have an hp photo program which is (surprisingly) called image-editor. Otherwise, thats it. It works relatively well.
I can model, and have modeled some ships. I just don't know what the next step is.

@star-captain-saber, on Dec 16 2007, 02:05 PM, said in Wings 3D:

1. How do I actually create a ship to be used in nova?

2. How can I use Wings to do this?
3. How do I texture my ship?
4. How can I make engine glows/ other cool engine effects
5. How do I control where the weapons fire from?

In brief:

1. Create a model of a ship, and then make renders of it in a variety of rotations, 36 being the usual number. So for example, the first render would have the ship facing straight up, the second would rotate it slightly, the third a little more, and so on until the last image is almost at the same angle that the first image was. The results of this step can then be fed into a program to create a grid of images, which you can use in most plug-in editors to create new ship graphics.
2. I wouldn't recommend using Wings for EV ships, actually; from all that I've seen, it's easy to use, but hard to impossible to get nice-looking results out of as its renderer is so primitive. So it's a good program to learn on, but you'll want to graduate to something more capable (e.g. Blender) to get the really nice-looking ships.
3. Texturing depends heavily on the program you're using, and good textures are never easy to make.
4. Engine glows are simply an additional set of images made like the ones in (1), which are overlaid on the ship image when the engines are fired. The same process is used for running lights, weapon glows, and the like, though a different one is used for ships that actually change shape (like the Leviathan or Argosy).
5. Ship data in the plug-in includes a set of offsets from the center to indicate where bullets come out of. In EV Nova it's actually a bit more complex as ships aren't rendered from straight above, so the exit points actually describe ovals as you rotate the ship, but that's basically how it works.

Okay. I'll try blender.

For the texturing, do I need a certain program?

Thanks for your reply