with just the guns or in total?

The only thing I have to say about the guns is that they're all on top. Although very naval, it also means the belly has no strikecraft cover, unless the few there are supposedly enough.

Dunno if this is common of your models, but I would swear the other vessels have had better coverage (although I know in Sins the Z axis is not as big of an issue as RL).

Well, the sins engine limit is around the 50k triangles for a model... so, you have room for really make what you want...

Double you poly count will not be a huge problem for the game speed... capitalship are few onscreen ( not like these thousand fighter/bomber/tradeship/etc )... all is handle by the GPU via shader... and the memory used for a 50k or 25k model is not very huge ( texture not taken in account )...

Well, there is arcs... +- 90°... problem is that these arc are a constant... i am trying to put 160 turret on a model... was able to put 108 of them but for the remaining, i was obligate to remodel all the back of the model... well, i will not complain to much, the sins 3D engine seem to be relatively good...

50k polys and 400 ships onscreen? That's zoomed out, right? Because any engine that can display 20 million polygons without framerate loss can be considered not good, but probably something that accidentally strayed into our time via a quantum gate timeslip accident in the future.

Once they get the point cloud tech up and running for real, I think that will be right up your alley.

As for me, here's one of the Titan models I've been working on, 5766 polygons:

I don't know how ManSh00ter work but organic is not really difficult once you know how to use some tools... by example, in wings3d, you have some option who are only activated in expert mode ( need to modify your configuration )... one of these tool is called magnet... a very powerfull tool for sculpt organic shape... a little video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3E1KZ8ZhE8 ... have learn to use magnet with poser a long time ago, allowing me to make body shape that morph don't allow... I bet that your software have something like magnet too !!!

The real difficulty with organics is the UV... almost impossible to make a UV without any texture strech somewhere... well, it is a problem similar to these of sphere...

I played it on several ati cards/hardware setups and the performance was consistently bad across the board. I was told it was simply an nvidia-biased engine.

Redoing the cannons for the bEta capitals as it was my 1st attempt at texturing. Will also reference the model so other capitals that use it dont require separate changes. See Softimage|XSI - Referencing

I might get rid of the base and just have the rotator merging with the ship.

Now I just need to figure out how to make a good -da sheet. 

Promising superstructure. I like where it's going. And yes, the Undead seem to be the right species for doing something Gothic. I always thought of the Anahn as your Baroque species.

Myfist, good looking textures. The guns are simple, but real naval cannons are. So it's looking good. Nice thing about Sins is that you don't have to do any real work with weapon animations.

Yes, you can have them fire to the side and then veer off to hit targets in front of the ship, as you can see here:

But you have to be careful how you position your hardpoints (I've found that it is best to us 15 degree steps when rotating). If you place them incorrectly, then most likely result is the ship firing its weapons from the center point (inside the hull). Depending on how you've set up your weapons in the .entity file, the ship may also be unable to fire in the desired direction at all.

@Thoumsin, the technique I use is simple strip modelling to set up main edgeflows, then tweaking those, extruding edges, welding points etc. I do use Softimage's tweak tool, but mostly for point manipulation and to smooth out edgeflows. I always wrap it up with Relax and Smooth to create an even, smooth wireframe, then conclude with some more tweaking where necessary and that's it.

The thing with the way its done in that video is that the model is either using smooth subdivision or NURBS and is actually useless for games. I prefer to always work with non-smoothed out models because that way I get a clear perception on how the model will look in game and I can easily spot problem areas.

Also, with strip modelling you have a great degree of precision when it comes to controlling your polygon count, so you can have more polygons in detailed areas and skip them in less detailed ones.

As for setting up UV's, these days I use automatic tools for that (used to be a lot of work, but now its done in five minutes), and just spend time arranging my UV islands so that I maximize texture coverage for areas which need a lot of detail/visibility. With organic models, using a polypainting app, such as ZBrush, eliminates texture stretching since the textures get auto-distorted to counter any UV stretching. In fact, I use ZBrush exclusively now when it comes to texturing, I don't even touch the textures in Photoshop until it's time to do some channel editing and prep them for import into the game.

When designing models for a game, one should always follow the "less is more" rule of thumb. That means that you start simple (as you do with box modeling) and keep it simple for as long as possible. Your ships are quite complex, but I'd like to see some wireframe shots to see where those extra polygons build up - my guess would be at those little crevices and surface detail. However, adding new edges, faces and vertices should be done only when geometry is required - which it usually isn't for the majority of fine detail. Usually you want to add geometry detail only in obvious situations.

That way you always have a nice, relatively simple mesh to work with. You add fine detail by either having a simple base mesh and building a more complex detailed mesh on top of it, then baking normal maps, OR you can again use an app like Zbrush to add insane surface detail to your meshes without actually messing with base geometry.

Personally, I usually add some geometry detail where it is needed, but only at a basic level. For example, I might model a simple hole in the hull, but texture it in ZBrush so that it has all sorts of stuff in it - it looks just as good as if I modeled all that detail right in, but only at a fraction of the polygon count.

As for ZBrush itself, a good resource to check out is the Digital Tutors tutorials on the subject - they cover everything from polypainting to actual scuplting (which is actually what ZBrush is designed for). The app might seem really complex at first, but once you get the hang of basics, the rest is pretty intuitive.

Well, nobody know the real limit of the sins engine... the 50k limit is more the limit from the little piece of software who convert the xsi file to the sins .mesh ...

There is maybe ( need to be tested ) a work around... by example, cut your 100k or over model in section... back, middle, front... save each of them like a individual model but, by example, add 2 hardpoint on the center section who call particle effect for render the front and back section...

Well, it is not the perfect work around since in the shipyard, only the middle section will be build... particle effect are only activated when the ship is launch... and i am not sure that collision detection will work on the part generated via particle... but i think that it is worth a try...

The thing is, its really a shame to tie up so many polys into turrets - your hull meshes look just fine to me, ie. what you would expect for a game model, but turrets are over detailed, again, for a game model - that kind of geometry detail would be perfectly justified if you were building the models for straight up CGI animation, when you would need closeup shots etc.

But for a game, you have to think also of what the player will actually notice. And I can guarantee you that 99% of people will not notice the exquisite detail you put on the underside of the turret barrel. My advice would be, have a simple turret mesh, and bake the normal map onto it from the super-detailed meshes you have built. Voila, problem solved and it will look just as good.

But, you have to UV map the meshes for that first.

Having particles represent parts of your ship is not that good of an idea, because particles kick in only when you zoom in on the action, and that means parts of your ship are going to pop in and out of existence from time to time. And yeah, collision detection doesn't work with particles.

I'll be trying to aim for a lot of up close shots on the turrets if I can manage. The camera system in sins is rather difficult. I made the turrets as low poly as I could - some are only around 150 - but I am not willing to butcher their quality completely. I may use the models in another engine in the future, upon which case I'd probably end up remodeling them and increasing their detail much further.

As long as the performance doesn't impact my recording conditions I will keep adding detail if it's possible. I didn't know particles vanished from a distance, though...

If I wanted to use these models in CGI I would need a lot more detail than what I can model.

Interesting, I didn't know the dev exe had camera controls. I am definitely going to be checking those out really soon.