Hyena

[Phlogios]

Whoever made the new Hyena model, this is for you, and for every other artist who has made a ship for VS. I just made a normal map for your model, and the result is not the best ever, because the UV-Map is not aligned in the way the normal-mapping program wants it to be. It would be appreciated if ALL ships' UVs were changed so that every group faces north. Another problem is that the hyena's texture is too low-res, with the 512x512 size. A third problem is that the model is lacking detail, a bit. Very square-ish, with sharp edges.

So, If we want the effect maps to work properly, we need all the UV-groups to face north, and all ship models deserve the same detail as the textures.

I could modify the hyena with the artist's permission.

Edit:
Oh yeah, another thing that bothers me is that the cockpit of the hyena has a mock reflection. That ship deserves a real shininess map and full specular. It's a popular ship, or at least it was in 0.4.3

[Madawg]

You can fix most of the normal map orientation problems by working on it channel by channel in Photoshop. It's pretty easy but it take quite a lot of time.
Most of the time, you'll just have to invert colours on some selected areas (black to white and vice versa, the 50% gray isn't changing). Then you'd better renormalize it, shouldn't be really necessary but just to be sure...

And for the low-res texture, you can probably live with it if you make a nicely detailed normal map with a higher resolution. Of course, I know it's not your job but maybe it can save the model...

And for the geometry... well... I don't have any answer... With a projected normal map, you don't necessarily a high polycount on the game model but since you don't have any high-poly model to project on the low one, I don't see any immediate solution (other than redoing it).