I think by "ordinary", Rob ment in terms of the science fiction depiction of futureistic spacecraft.
Given the vast amount of video games, comic books, even movies featureing futureistic space craft, these designs are rather ordinary or genaric...don't take that as an insult...what it means is that they don't stand out, there is little alluring about the shapes.
One of the things many amature designers try to do when developing spaceship designs "built by the same military, fource, nation, planet, whatever" is reuse the same basic shape changeing only the details...the modular design principal...engineering, even here in the real world does not work that way.
In Star Wars the Millenium Falcon is supposedly buit by the same company that manufactured the rebel blockaide runner...yet the two ships have vastly different shapes, however they both look to have come off the assembly line together simply because the paneling, the hull details and markings are quite simular...so simular in some places that the two ships would seem to share the same modular componets...simply put its the details that should be shared, NOT the overall shape.
Another area amature designers need to work on is THE shape of the ship...far to often (and pretty clearly seen in these designs) the shape seems to be developed from a top down plan view with little reguard for dimentionality, thus leading to rather horizontal pancake like designs...the ship can look interesting when seen from above, but comeing at you, or even from the side, it looks like nearly every other amature designed sci-fi ship...Remeber there is no "up" in space, there is no gravity...work on developing shapes that can be instantly recognised without one haveing to see any details (this holds especialy true if there is ANY element of action in your game).
As it stands now, take a look at your Raptor mk2 and mk3 designs...think of thier place, abilities, merits in the game...right now, seen from even a reasonable difference the player is going to have a hard time telling the two craft appart because thier overall shape is very simular...and for whatever reason the player needs to know that ship A is a mk3 and ship B is a mk2, you then DON'T want the player to have to depend on the games UI to spell out the difference for them.
I'm not telling you all this to critisize the talents of your or your modeler friend, so please don't take it that way...this is simply hard learned lessons any respectable industrial design and graphic arts school will teach you.
Given the vast amount of video games, comic books, even movies featureing futureistic space craft, these designs are rather ordinary or genaric...don't take that as an insult...what it means is that they don't stand out, there is little alluring about the shapes.
One of the things many amature designers try to do when developing spaceship designs "built by the same military, fource, nation, planet, whatever" is reuse the same basic shape changeing only the details...the modular design principal...engineering, even here in the real world does not work that way.
In Star Wars the Millenium Falcon is supposedly buit by the same company that manufactured the rebel blockaide runner...yet the two ships have vastly different shapes, however they both look to have come off the assembly line together simply because the paneling, the hull details and markings are quite simular...so simular in some places that the two ships would seem to share the same modular componets...simply put its the details that should be shared, NOT the overall shape.
Another area amature designers need to work on is THE shape of the ship...far to often (and pretty clearly seen in these designs) the shape seems to be developed from a top down plan view with little reguard for dimentionality, thus leading to rather horizontal pancake like designs...the ship can look interesting when seen from above, but comeing at you, or even from the side, it looks like nearly every other amature designed sci-fi ship...Remeber there is no "up" in space, there is no gravity...work on developing shapes that can be instantly recognised without one haveing to see any details (this holds especialy true if there is ANY element of action in your game).
As it stands now, take a look at your Raptor mk2 and mk3 designs...think of thier place, abilities, merits in the game...right now, seen from even a reasonable difference the player is going to have a hard time telling the two craft appart because thier overall shape is very simular...and for whatever reason the player needs to know that ship A is a mk3 and ship B is a mk2, you then DON'T want the player to have to depend on the games UI to spell out the difference for them.
I'm not telling you all this to critisize the talents of your or your modeler friend, so please don't take it that way...this is simply hard learned lessons any respectable industrial design and graphic arts school will teach you.