the tundra

[Treewyrm]

People make so much stuff...

Firstly, for someone who has seen the entire B5 (as well as it's all spin-offs), learning modeling on creating replicas of the ships in there years ago, and basically anything up on that one - there is no ship like that there. I'm really sure it's a mistake there and you simply took it for granted, what a joke...

Secondly 3DB has nothing to do with textures or materials whatsoever. The only difference between 3DB and CMP is just that it has a single component mesh whilst CMP is multi-component and stores several 3DB's inside of it linking them to each other via fix node. And it's very simple to remember what is what, since CMP likely means "CoMPonent", so it's component-based mesh and it's easier to remember it like that.

Now about the nomad textures, which is entirely a different story. The game has environment map trigger hardcoded to any material starting with the keyword "Nomad" in it, it's what gives the surface that nice colorful look, the rest (color, transparency) is done in regular material textures, and all you need to do is give your surfaces a material starting with "Nomad", like "Nomad surface" or something like that, and then creating embed material with textures inside the model using UTF editor, basically just copying the same mat/tex lib nodes from vanilla ships into a new one, and viola - you got those shiny textures. Nothing really stops from playing around with colors, transparency and so on while at it. When I was making nebula interior hollow sphere for Iota I didn't know about that and accidentally stumbled upon the feature by giving the material a name starting with that keyword, the result however was quite curious as you can see here while it was supposed to be like this, so it put that environment mapping on the nebula sphere, and the name triggers it. So this is how it works. Alternatively you could of course set that environment map manually in ship definition block in shiparch.ini, since the basic environment map used for most ships and objects is actually just an imitation of specular surface effect.