Coalition Ships

[Treewyrm]

I recommend to align uv elements in such way there is little to no unused space left. Group identical/symmetrical so that they use same space on the texture. It's a common approach when skinning models. Your current map is a terrible waste of space, there are many identical elements, too much unused space and even overlapping.

Now, in Freelancer developers used different approach, a somewhat similar to what can be seed in level design in other games. Basically using several small seamless textures to cover various surfaces with them. This method allows re-use of texture in many models that share the same surface material/ornament type, while custom uv map is usually being used in single model only. Plus there are other concerns such as texture size. You can't make just any large size, the larger it is the more memory it will use, as a result when another player approaching that ship will notice big lag while his computer loads your massive texture into the memory.

Here is my recommendation and I suggest you follow it: make 3-4 small seamless textures (64x64 or 128x128, DDS DXT1 with mipmaps) and use them cover surfaces of your ship. Some people make huge single texture for entire ship, from optimization standpoint it's quite wrong. And games, unlike renders, require a lot of attention to optimization both as in model polycount and textures as well. Now sometimes, just sometimes single texture can work fine for a ship when it has small amount of surfaces and generally ship is small by itself. But that is for as long as you know what exactly you are doing and how are you going to arrange your surfaces on uv map.

There are number of tools available around to create seamless textures, for example Texture Maker and Genetica. Of course we shouldn't forget about photoshop although it's not designed for that task (but can work fine as well). If you don't want to create new textures (why making more redundant textures?) use existing ones, with creative approach it can do wonders and will make your ship look better and more Freelancer-ish as you will not have to mimic freelancer textures on your own, you just use them and that's all. Given that you're not a texture artist I suggest to go with Freelancer textures instead of your own.