It's about time this site started to accept 3-D models!

[Shadowth117]

Hmmm... You're really smart when it comes to these sort of things! However, since I have no idea how textures work and how I can actually use these models, I'm better off just studying them and creating replicas of those models.

Say, do you happen to know why most video game models are usually not in one piece and why they tend to use triangle meshes instead of square meshes since those are two of the factors to why I'm having trouble using them?

As for my Gummi Ship, I tried to see if I can correct its normals, but I didn't really knew how to do it. I tried to do a Google search, but I couldn't actually find the answer. I was going to ask you for help, but you probable wouldn't help since you never actually use Maya and you'll probably say that I should Google search it or something. Instead of wasting time on that, I decided to just create new cubes altogether with more favorable results.
*Images*
I may not be truly good at this normal business and not very good at texturing, but it's safe to say that my modeling skills are pretty neat!

Actually some consoles DO use quads like Sega's Model2B arcade system as you can see from this game

which is rendered in such a way that you can actually see it. It just depends on different factors as to why you would use either tris or quads for your polygons with the main one being performance related things for real time rendering like in video games.

To answer your second question, N64 models were made like that probably (and I'm assuming here) because the system rendered many smaller parts faster than few big parts. For modern models though, they are often in pieces because only material could be assigned to a particular object. This can also occur with large models such as level models so the game doesn't have to constantly render a bunch of polygons that aren't even in view.

As for your Gummy ship I can see that you've fixed the problem, but you may want to try looking into taking some classes if you'd like to learn more about this stuff. Making a character model for example is far more complicated then what you have there and you'll have to deal with things much harder to understand then normals to do it. Speaking of which normals, are basically the direction a surface is facing in 3d.

It seems that you've still got a lot to learn, but everyone starts somewhere. I myself am currently trying to take classes in school for this type of stuff and I'll tell you right now that if I tried to make anything terribly organic looking in 3d it would probably look like crap.