BTW, I went and did something even better to get the desired effect.. I went and ordered myself a copy of Ultimate Unwrap 3D, which from the looks of the demo will let me UV-map individual sections of my ship models in whatever mappings I desire and place them all on one texture, so for instance if I were doing a Spathi Eluder I could have five sphere maps and five cylinder maps, all laid out on one texture, which would be much easier to paint than flaying the whole thing out into one mess where you can't even tell what's what when you go to paint it!
Now if SE5 would only use procedural texturing... I suggested that to Aaron but said "never mind" once I realized there were no really easy ways to generate DirectX procedural textures... but who knows, he might find one... or I might end up writing one, if I ever get to the procedural shading section of this DirectX book I'm reading!
Oh, and BTW this is not all a bunch of fuss over nothing - I AM planning on making ships, I just haven't been able to find the right tools to make them comfortably, but I think I've got it figured out now - Wings for modelling, Ultimate Unwrap 3D for UV mapping, GIMP for texturing, and Pixie for rendering
edit: never got around to uploading the ship I was going to show
[ June 07, 2004, 23:45: Message edited by: Ed Kolis ]