How to make your own ship parts. A tutorial walkthrough.

[Airmaster]

Grouping parts 101: making ship parts

* Start with a hull scale starter block, Attach only the first ship part to the starter block. scale to liking.

* Attach all other ship parts to the red color hard points of the first ship part and of all other parts. Scale to liking.

* When finished assembling design, click and highlight very first ship part used, press and hold down shift key and select all the other parts then click on group parts button. If done right all ship parts will merge to one.

To Save Ship Part Design:

* Ungroup parts ( very important )

* Repeat steps above but DO NOT GROUP ship parts

* After selecting all parts again simply click on the save as ship part button, name ship part and save it.

* Make sure to save ship part design ( as un-grouped ) as a ship template for editing

Look for saved part at bottom newest Terran ship parts style.

Good luck.

[Airmaster]

Can this get a temporary sticky please?

[Illauna]

Great little quick guide. Might be better to include this as a Steam Guide instead a pinned thread. This way I can also reference it in Discord.

Also, there is a minor bug with parts. After creating the part it will be invisible. If you want the image to appear you can go to the Designs/Thumbnails folder and grab the PNG file and move it up a level. This will fix the hidden thumbnails issue. It's just referencing the file structure from GC3. I brought it up to the devs again.

[Airmaster]

Not sure how to create a steam guide. I have no experience doing that.

I have not encountered this bug. If my custom ship part doesn't appear right away in ship parts menu I exit the ship designer and reopen it and it's ready to use. Mind you that I am not using the in game ship designer to make my custom ship parts but they still appear in the in game ship designer.

From my experience using the stand alone ship designer offers the most convenience for making custom ships and ship parts.

[Illauna]

Stand alone designer or do you mean the main menu version?

[Illauna]

It's not that they dont work is the icon is missing so you see a blank box. If you hover over it then you see it.

[Airmaster]

Originally posted by Illauna:

Stand alone designer or do you mean the main menu version?

Yes from the main menu.

Originally posted by Illauna:

It's not that they dont work is the icon is missing so you see a blank box. If you hover over it then you see it.

I see all the icons for the custom ship parts I've made so far. There are several icons for default games ship parts that are missing in selection menu if that is what you're referring to but I doubt it you are. I'm not having that issue with my own custom ship parts icons missing. Everything looks good on my end.

[Airmaster]

Thank you for adding sticky. Much appreciated. Hope this helps other players designing ships.

👍

[Aaron]

I posted this in "Feature Requests" and "Ship Design Feedback" too, but also thought it would do well here. I've spent a fair bit of time with Gal Civ 3 and I just downloaded Gal Civ 4.

I was looking at the ship creator tool in Gal Civ 4 and I was wondering; would it be possible to add a feature that allows for players/designer to import custom assets (ships and/or components, etc...) from external modelling software (example: Blender, Unreal Engine, MAYA, Cinema 4D, etc...)? How many people would be interested in a feature like this?

[Airmaster]

No you can't import ship parts made on third party 3D editing software the file formats are incompatible.

The ship designer already provides a means to actually make your own style ship parts as explained in the tutorial walkthrough. I would recommend suggesting they add more ship parts to the ship designer and expand the selection of parts to chooses from to design custom ship parts.

Personal speaking for myself I wouldn't be interested in using third party 3D editing software to create ship parts simply because I can already actually do this in the ship designer now and not have to do any file conversions to insure file format compatibility between games ship graphics files and 3D editing software graphics files.

I wouldn't be worth my trouble and be more troublesome than it's worth given the fact that the ship designer already provides players the means to do what you're generally proposing.

I personally would rather use what the game already provides to mod within the game without adding complicated third party graphics editors. I'm simply going to say no thank you.