What do i use to render ships?

[Ed Kolis]

Art of Illusion?
www.artofillusion.org

Has a great renderer (though you have to re-specify the render settings every time you start the program ) and you can export to .obj which can be converted to .x for use with SE5/Starfury!

edit: and I just found out about a cool Art of Illusion script which lets you create something, assign procedural displacement maps to it, and then use the script to convert the results of those displacement maps to REAL triangle meshes suitable for export into games like Starfury! Remember those Metroid beam cannons I submitted to the imagemod? Those were made with AoI procedural displacement maps to do the "details" (I didn't want to do all the detail of modelling them) - but it seems that now I could actually export something using that texture as a Starfury or SE5 ship model!