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Ship skins were discussed at fanfest, but there isn't a recording of the roundtable as far as I'm aware. There was a brief video at the keynote, but it wasn't clear what it meant. Some people seem to think the video previews a program that will allow players to customize their own ships...is that right?

In any case. I'm a big fan of the project and I reviewed it thus far on my nerd blog here: http://evelostfound.blogspot.com/2014/05/flying-and-dying-ship-skins-good-bad.html

Basically, my review says:
The best skins are those that add personality to ships, and thus far only the comet does so. The rest merely add a new paint job, and (worse) some of the new skins are mere collectors items (the T1 hauler skins from the fanfest stream). I give some suggestions to adding personality and character via the skins without jumping all the way to alliance logos, such as : adding damage to minmatar ships, such as bullet holes in the rifter. Or, make a rifter (e.g.) skin that permanently has the hull damage graphic (flames coming out of it) even when fully repaired, a graphic already in game. These sorts of additions would be a lot more fun to fly than a reddish looking rifter etc.

I've got very mixed opinions on painting ships. One the one side, the new ship textures look epic, on the other hand, shouldn't they just look epic to begin with? I never thought "The enterprise in Star Trek (the movie from 2009) look a bit plain, another paintjob would do the trick".
I think the problem is that we have rather outdated graphics. Eve does look epic in some respects, but in others we can tell that its an old game. Adding higher resolution textures, and finding neat ways to tile them on large things to save memory, would help. But we would also need a rework of shaders. Shaders are alpha and omega in games today, they can make bad textures look good and they can change and tweak every object simply by adjusting the shader settings.
Maybe paint schemes can be a shader effect? Like making textures and particular colors darker (until completely black), false color, black and white, lighter (until completely white), messing with the RGB settings? If we could adjust these sorts of shader settings on all textures on all the ships and items and space and planets and moons and asteroids, then we could theoretically have custom paintjobs for everything. We would just need to have each texture separated from the others so that we can then adjust the shader settings for lights and different things in different ways. For example adjust the gold part on the apocalypse in a certain way, and the surrounding texture in another way, and the shaders for the lights adjusted in a third way. Then the size of these custom paintjobs could be a tiny set of instructions (a set of number values) that when inserted into the client computer shaders would then render the custom paintjobs.
If I were to start up a shader team to rework the entire shader system, I would go to Crytek for expertise. But I have played around with the cryengine trilogy so much I may be biased.

I'm all in

That would be a cool idea, but it would be as immesion-breaking as being able to draw giant members on elongated cruiser hulls.

Fire is kind of a major problem for astronauts. If it wasn't for the fact that flames on a spaceship would quickly consume precious oxygen, propellant or maybe even fuel depending on reactor type, fire is still expanding gas. And expanding gas is a problem because it pushes your ship in the opposite direction to where the gas is expanding to. You would have a very inefficient additionnal thruster with that skin.

At someone's suggestion from another thread, I'm posting this here as well.

As one manufactures you make and sell a lot of stuff. It might be nice when you sold a ship, if when it was eventually lost, you could find out about it.

I was thinking perhaps add a "marker's mark" (Corp Ticker) associated with the ship. When it ends up on the killboard, you can find out who made it (and the maker can find out what happened to it).

Special bonus points, if a tiny stenciled Corp Ticker and Corp Logo of the maker's corp is added to the model.

So is this is for ship skins and the concept of ship painting?

i'll take any VW bus spotted in a picture from Woodstock.

I want wide racing stripes down the center of the Mach - maybe lime green or candy apple orange.

Oh gee, what fun it would be to undock in a Purple and Yellow trimmed Hyperion and to stay with it's original intent, down by the stern of the ship, could you put something like verry thick white rubber band?

The Orcas are going to need food truck windows on the sides - it would be too difficult to deal with the void of space meeting the unsuited human, like we already have in CQ, so those just need to be 3d stencils.

I can see a vast array of hood ornaments from supers being sold in sizes to fit frigs and humongous prices - kind of like monocles and the welding goggles, just another garish display of "Because I can...." giving a hint of the personality to be expected.

We have special ships for so many professions, we need a "Scammer Cruiser" with "read my bio" painted across the bow and the rest of the ship covered in facsimilies of currencies so the scammers can truthfully say, "I have BILLIONS..."

the possibilities just blow the mind, well ok. maybe just gentle breeze across my lower occipital lobe.

Oh that gives me an idea! stretch a netting across the two bows of the Megathron and name in the Corpus Callosum

Bumpers stickers - a whole world of possibilities, like "Keep Minmatar Weird" "My Other Space Ship is a Titan" onr rspecially for the tristan "Don' I look like something from Jurassic Park?'

i 2nd this guy, I like the new paint and stuff, but not going to buy any of it since ships are just the same as before... so get on with the project and let us be creative.

Looking forward to more developments on this front :)