Like to say they're nice, look like my WHsmith chess set.
First of all, don't make the peices look like plastic - looks very crappy, instead make a basic wood texture in Paintshop Pro - I'll agree 100% black isn't an option ...
I'd go with Black being RGB(16,16,16) and white being RGB(230,240,210) - provide a more creme colour which is much better.
Now in PSP, make the textures 256x256 @ RGB(128,128,128) or defualt grey ... now make another 2 the same size in each of the side colours.
To the grey one goto effects -> texture effects -> sculpture -> and use finish wood
then copy & paste into each of the others as new layers, in the black make the layer lighten and creme make it darken then move the slider to 20%
Oki may not look like much but now we take it, map onto the model (you can export to a lithunwrap format, map it and place it back into milkshape as you'll need to highlight before finally finishing) - once mapped, give the texture a spectacular of white, at 50% (slider below spectacular)
Export and its all done...
Creating stuff suchas this is really more of a job for another product that can use splines - best free option is probably gmax, as it exports in md3 which is good for effects. But you can setup a spline and array it around then cross section then surface (itterations 1 or you just thousands of polygons), UV Map with a capped cylinder and possibly add at the side stuff like the cross unwrapped - and your done with actual modelling in about 10mins per peice. A few more mins for the actual texturing - you can open the texture editor and press print screen to get the actual UV Map, work over that and you can even highlight areas of the texture.
I'm wondering are you gonna have a player hand like the black 'n' white one - cause i think that'd be a cool gimmic
[b] New interactive driving system... i like my new blue and black steering wheel
[b]
