How to make cool things?

So the title of this topic is very generic, but I've been looking around at some of the things created by other people here on the boards, notably Delphi and Darthkev, and I was wondering how both they and the Nova team managed to create all they have. In essence, I'm just wondering how to make graphics, specifically for ships and planets. I have MissionComputer, which I have a basic understanding of, and google Sketchup, which I can work well with. I prefer the blockier and simpler nature of Sketchup over something like Blender, which I still haven't figured out how to use, but Sketchup can't do realistic looking graphics. So what should I use to 'paint' my ships, for lack of a better word? Texture, that would be a better word. And then how do I create a shan to be used by the game? Any advice, comments, questions, or concerns would be fantastic, thanks!

hey man. to answer your direct questions, your best bet for making textures would be the GIMP. it's a nice and handy free painting & etcetera application that has a lot of documentation available, so you can easily find tutorials on the internet.

as far as making a shan goes, usually what happens is you make your ship, set the overhead camera, and then create a rotation animation of 36 frames, 9 frames per 90 degrees, going clockwise, in your 3d app of choice. you then want to render that animation out and extract a sprite sheet.

the classical means of doing this is to use the community application m2s to extract a sprite sheet from that. however given that most modern computers can't run m2s, you may be able to render out individual frames and use something like texturepacker to do the job.

in the long term I recommend graduating from sketchup to blender at some point. I know blender's kind of on the horrifying side, but it's very heavily documented, powerful, and free. the easiest way to learn blender is to use youtube tutorials, there's a lot of them and there's series explicitly devoted to teaching newcomers to use blender.

I'll second everything Shlimazel said. While sketchup is much easier to model with, it's very hard to do any texture work within it, and practically impossible to even do a true render. The pseudo renders I've done for some of my ships aren't true renders, and also don't have any actual textures, just paint. Once you can learn Blender, things should actually get easier. I still need to learn it, myself.