Ok first off brief introduction, I am Feathers the dev in charge of modeling/texturing/ui graphics. I have been a bit stalled as late with my GPU frying, but don't worry there is some great stuff in the works.

To make a useful submission a model is a nice place to start. I use Blender 3D, this is a completely free software with awesome functionality. More than enough that is needed to make the simple .obj we use. Other programs like 3dsMax and Maya may have lower cost educational versions available. I know you used to be able to get Maya for $60 with a tutorial book.

The key though is a good texture. Without a good texture a decent model is useless and with a bad one it is ruined. With a good texture a simple model can come to life. So I would encourage you to make textures for submissions, even if they are simple place holders. Let me say this, there is no way I am unwrapping your model to make a texture, make sure if you intend to have someone make you a texture to generate a UV map. Programs like Gimp 2.0, Paint.net and Inkscape are great free resources. Photoshop of course is great if you can afford it. I think it is about $200 for an educational version, and well worth it imo. Most of the textures until recently that I did were in Gimp, it does have the capability, though I find the work flow a bit cumbersome and slow.

I see allot of great effort out there, but people are coming up just short of making something that could be usable. Now you may say you want some feedback or something on your model, I can give you that, but until you get it closer to completion it is hard to give a full evaluation. I don't mind doing textures or tweaking models for people in the community, but I am not here to make just any ship. Ones that are useful to the game of course have priority to me.

*If you have any questions regarding how to create a usable submission please as here. I may do something of a tutorial if there is an interest.

*If you think you have the skills to dev graphics I am looking for a second. Been working on my own for some time now and it is nice to have someone to collaborate with.

*If you are reasonably skilled but getting stuck in Blender specifically I can hop on vent and walk you through the program.

~Feathers

Hey,
I currently use wings3d and am able to make decent models (I'll break into blender today). I'm also ok at making textures (photoshop), my issue is going from the .obj file and making it a texturable surface... I don't know how to do it. I know theres some stuff with UV mapping but I don't really understand it. Think you could enlighten me?
Thanks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3M21GqAgHM

It is a decent one about UV mapping. He doesn't do the keyboard short cuts, but its good for a start.

'u' hotkey in the edit window gives you more unwrap options. Project from view is particularly useful

'ctrl+n' hotkey is to recalculate normals