i know the techniques for modeling most overything on this, except the exterior of the cockpit. what techniques should it use? what type of tool? (nurbs, mesh, subsurf, curves)?
thanks for the help!!
You’ll want to build that in multiple pieces which means you’ll likely use all of those methods where they’re appropriate. In the end, however, you should just make it into a mech…er…mesh… 
Honestly though, I don’t think nurbs is the way to go with this one. It doesn’t lend itself to that kind of smoothness. But there will be places on there where you’ll need it. I’d start with a cube and start subdividing and extruding. That can work wonders.
k thanks!!
id get the basic shape right with a subsurf, then convert to mesh so you can add more detail. w00t! mechwarrior!
Thats a good method to use, just don’t set the subsurf too high else it’ll have an unmanageable vertex count and you won’t be able to edit it at all.
Wait. Please tell me that you mean you can turn a subsurf directly to a mesh…Please? Could it be? Good Gawd! Please tell me how to do that. If it’s Alt-C, then I’m an idiot, cuz that never occured to me and I’ve no idea what mode you need to be in, etc… :o
I wouldn’t say it that harsh. 
(Object mode)
Isn’t it great when all the lights come on and suddenly the world makes perfect sense??? YAY for merc!
alt+c converts just about any object to mesh, sometimes to other formats inbetween too!!
If it could only convert my thoughts to a mesh…
Yes, absolutely, I see the light; AND IT BURNS! It makes everything all better now. As long as I’m here, any thoughts on why using booleans on anything other than a simple, flat face causes the whole drawing to get screwed up? Been thinkin’ that it can’t just be me…
Booleans are in the beta-stage at this point. They algorithm used has no rithm. (get it?) one thing you can try doing: rotate one of the objects in the boolean operation VERY slightly. A fraction of a degree. I read somewhere that that’s supposed to help. There was something else too…
I personally wouldn’t use subsurf for something solid and metallic like that. Subdivision surfaces are best for organic things, with smooth curves and bends. For metal plating, you want it absolutely flat, which would be very very hard to control using subsurfs. I’d use lots of (non-subsurfed) meshes, with lots of extrusion and bevelling.
Yeah…you could subsurface PORTIONS of it. As long as you weren’t making it all one mesh to begin with. And then later convert all of the pieces to meshes for texturing or whatever.
you would need subsurfs to model the cockpit part. You need some sort of smooth editing thing, but using nurbs, etc, doesn’t give you as much control.
Just model the little egg shapped bit in subsurfs, convert the subsurfed mesh to a normal mesh, then you can just extrude the edges. It means you can model the rest of it without subsurfs to give you the flat, mechanical look, but that the two portions will actually meet properly.
/me slaps head
D’oh! The cockpit. I missed that. Yes I’m an idiot and yes subsurfs would be good for the cockpit 
crawls back into my little hole in the corner and gets some more coffee
I can’t wait to see what this thing looks like. You guys are very good with your sketches. Mine look like something from a primary school. (There’s even artists there who are better.)
convert the subsurfed mesh to a normal mesh
banana_sock, until you say this, I don’t know that a mesh cam be of many types, like subsurfed mesh and normal mesh… Where can I learn about this?
I’m actually getting a lot of problems trying to export meshes to Nebula Device, specialy whem I make something more than extrude (like creating new faces and vertices for a mesh, joining meshes to make an unique object, removing faces and creating new ones, etc.) I think it’s my fault, not blender, scripts or Nebula that some faces disapear from my model, uv-mapped textures only works correctly in Nebula whem I assign them with other prograns than blender, etc… Can it be a mesh type problem?
I’m at now using OBJio.py script to convert my blender models to OBJ and MilkShape to convert them to .n3d and assign correctly the uv-mapped textures, but MilkShape isn’t free software and I need to find a good way to convert the models. OBJio corrected some of my face exporting problems for multiple meshes, but uv-mapping with blender still don’t works fine to export to n3d. It works fine with OBJ, and MilkShape exports correctly to obj too, but not to n3d. The only way it works fine is whem I use their uv-mapper, but select faces in this software its extremely dificult!
Anyone can help me?
I can’t be positive but it sounds to me like your faces might be flipping over. Select the mesh, tab into edit mode, select all of the vertices and press CTRL + N and click the box that comes up. That will recalculate the normals of your mesh and some of them may become visible again. I hope this helps because this has happened to me before and it solved my problem.
I readed something about the vertex order to define the normals in some aplications, something like invert the order (clock or counterclock) will make the faces visible or invisible because you can view their back… I actually don’t know if this was my problem, I need to investigate… If I really remember, I just try to recalc the normals outside several times, with several models (may I miss the specific model that get this desapeared faces… I will try it again), but I think I already done it!
Thanks for memember me… If it don’t works, I will post other reply…
At now, I need some resources to understand how to model for export to Nebula Device… It’s too hard to get documentation obout this game engine… Anyone knows where to find decent documentation? No need to be as good as Elysiun, but need to be at least active!