Blender 3d Ship Design

I made this last night after finishing off the Blue Goose...

I was going for the Reign-land Gunboat type ship class... because when viewed from above, it looks like the eagles in the merchant shop on Reignland.

I'm including the mesh... still waiting to hear if my works are even useable...

Are there any rules I should know about when designing a model?

On my Mesh008 there are turret mounts on top and bottom of wing, one near the hull, and I left a few flat spots for gun mounts.

I also put 6 engine exhaust ports...not sure if that's even possible.

I'd like to place running lights that blink around the ship, and the engine balls would be glowing and rotating, but not sure how to animate in ms3d just yet.

I'm just looking for any input from anyone who has experience designing these ships.

Quote from SWAT_OP-R8R

but it would be cool if the ships have some cockpit on the mesh

I'm not using any of your tools yet, just making meshes in Blender.

What should I do after I make a mesh? What program do I play with next ? LOL this is all still new to me.

Making a windshield was easy... I'll attach it to this post.

I guess I should start learning the next steps in building a ship. I read the PDF file explaining how to get a ship in to Freelancer, so wish me luck. The directions seemed pretty straightforward, and I might even design an exe to build a mod from a folder, but fist things first. Get a ship into FL on my own, then build the program to streamline the precess LOL

Ok throw out mesh 008.... it became waaaay to messy and wasn't going in the direction I was looking for.

Mesh 010 is in the works... mesh is clean and complete, now just working on the materials. I hope the materials export to ms3d !

As you can see in the photo, mesh008 was getting way too cluttered, so I had to spend today re-designing mesh010.

Everything should be completed within a day or so.

PS: Right Click on the image below and choose View Image.... it will open full-size in browser, and then you can zoom in to see details.

Ok, mesh010 is colored and textured... I exported it to ms3d, and the colors are gone !

Here is the mesh with a bump map to add the hull plating effect.

Added a texture of Musgrave with a color of black to give it a camouflage look.

Here is what I get when I import the ms3d file back into blender

Like I said, still trying to figure all this stuff out... any advice ?

I'm not giving up on this...still learning how the blender exporter works...

if you delete the radar dish from the mesh, then the entire mesh is mirrored.

As soon as I figure the materials out I'll upload.

Ok I think I've done everything correctly... I just have no clue how to use Milk Shape, so I'll need assistance finishing this project.

I'm attaching the mesh,material and texture map in this zip file.

If this works, I'll put a tutorial together to help people make their own ships !

If you get this working in MilkShape, please tell me how you did it !!! I have no clue how that program works.

While I wait for someone to get back to me, I am playing around with another mesh.

This is not my mesh, I'm just modding it.

Maybe this could be SWAT_OP-R8R's new ship

The original Author of this mesh is

------------------------------ AMC MATADOR Highway Patrol ------------------------------
Version by Marsupi.
E-mail : mweill6055@clubinternet.fr
Downloaded from DMI at http://dmi.chez.tiscali.fr/models1.html
====================================================================

Here is a link to the original download page ... http://www.dmi3d.com/models/matador_police.rar