Originally posted by Assassin
How did you get to the level of expertise you are at now?
Practice. Then some more practice. Then a lot more practice. Then a lot of people telling me everything that was wrong with what I had done. Then more practice, plus some practice. Then some more criticism and practice.
Seriously, I got started with AutoCAD back in the 286 days. 3d support was rudimentary, so you ended up doing a lot of projections, rather than actual modelling. I also had a backgrond in technical drawing and drafting, which helped a lot.
Later, I picked up Truespace2, which was incredible. It let me actually BUILD things. Most everything started out badly, but some of my work was actually pretty good. In the end, none of it was any good for any serious use (like modding) because it all depended heavily on high poly counts, and overlapping solids. I tried Lightwave and 3dsMax and couldn't stand either of them because, well, they weren't like Truespace.
When I took a Lightwave class, I discovered how much more you could actually do with a decent modeller could do for you and I haven't looked back. I've got a long way to go before I can approach most people on this board, but I'm not bad.
Most importantly for putting ships together for Freespace, I think, is working with other people. I can't do anything but model a ship, create the lods, turret models, debris and shields (IE, all geometry stuff). I also don't have a lot of really original ideas. But when you combine my modelling with other people's ideas and skills, you get stuff like the Raynor, or the Naga, my Herc1 and Mjolnir or my rework of Ryx's carrier. I couldn't have created any of those on my own, but working with/from others, good things happened.
I have some good ideas and imagery in my mind for what could be some good ships, but my modelling skills just don't match my imagination. I know you all must have faced this situation when you were just starting out, so how did you deal with it? Did you aim for the sky at the beginning, trying again and again until you got it right? Or did you put these more ambitious projects on a backburner, stalling your creative talent, while making more simple models until your skills were good enough?
RSVP 
Yes, I aimed for the sky, and I turned out lots of crap. If I still have it, one of these days I'll post a picture of the Brute, a tug idea that turned into a fighter, and had absolutely no redeeming features at all.
Later, though after starting and stopping projects, and just basically trying to figure out how this or that tool worked (and more importantly, how it could be APPLIED), things started to come together.
One thing that really helped was learning how to patch up LtNarol's models that he made in Blender. They didn't convert very well into anything, and the geometry that blender generated was absolutely horrid. By cleaning up the geometry for him, I learned a lot about point by point and poly by poly handling of a mesh, and how to troubleshoot problems that might come up later in the ship modding process.
But mostly, its just practice.
