Welcome lee
Proclone is probably the expert on this, as the geometry of your model will dictate where and how your skin is applied across its surface.
You will need either JASC PaintShopPro or Adobe PhotoShop to actually design your skin. You create your skin in the form of a TrueVision Targa (.tga) file in 24-bit color depth.
In addition, you will need the nVidia DXT tools which contain a plug-in for those programs - this plug-in allows you to save your skin in the Direct Draw Surface (.dds) format which the game uses. They are available from nVidias developer section on their site, and I think CNCDEN had them up under their Renegade section.
You can see more info in a post I made here;-
http://www.genedit2k.com/forums/inde...436f20a5299beb