Any end-to-end tutorial for adding a ship?

[authormoreau]

I'm a novelist and I thought it'd be super cool to be able to fly my own ship in 3 dimensional space. I'm good with 3D design software (C4D & 3dsMax) as well as Photoshop, but I am hopeless at coding. Are there any tutorials on just quickly getting a ship model imported and working in Celestia?

I'll be perfectly honest, if it's super involved I'll never end up doing it as I want to but just don't have the spare time. I'd really like to do this, so hoping there's a tutorial that can walk me through it without having to spend days learning new skills. Thanks!

[pirogronian]

The only thing I can recall is official Celx manual. However, interactive flying in Celestia is possible only as abstract observer. On the other hand, any 3d model have to be assigned to a static trajectory.

[selden]

It's probably best to think of Celestia as being a 3D display program. It isn't designed to make it easy to fly spacecraft interactively, although it can be done in principle.

If you want an interactive spaceflight simulator, you might consider either Orbiter (free, Windows only) or Kerbal Space Program (not free; Win, Mac, Linux). Both implement real orbital dynamics, but Orbiter is much less forgiving. Many tutorials are available for both of them. KSP2 supposedly will be available RealSoonNow.

Some documentation about creating models for Celestia is available at
https://www.classe.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/modelling.html

Briefly, Celestia can directly display models written in the old 3DS format. Plugins have been written for Blender and Anim8or for exporting to Celestia's proprietary CMOD format. There's also a utility program (CMODMESH?) which supposedly can translate other 3D formats into CMOD, but I've never gotten it to work. Other people apparently have, though.