mosquitoman: Thank you. I might do a small animation later down the line. I need to finish the model and get some static images done first. For the animation idea you describe I found a nice Cinema4D expression (MoXPig from
MoXPig for CINEMA 4D )to use - I always had trouble calculating rotation of wheels as they travelled over ground - with this expresion applied to the wheels I only have to define a path for the object/s to travel and the expression sorts out the correct rotation per frame of travel.
A similar preview to the previous one with a few changes:
Finished the UV map and painting of the partial interior I made earlier. This took much longer than I thought and ended up using 250+ polygon selection tags which was a mind numbing excercise. Still. it's done now. The main interior colour is a very dark green which when rendered looks more realistic than my earlier green zinc primate colour.
The smoke texture I used for the upper wing surface was used for the engine smoke staining to the lower wings and engine panels - painted on a seperate layer, lightened, blured, smeared and the layer opacity lowered to around 50%. It looks sort of ok at replicating the typical greyish coloured British aircraft exhaust smoke staining (caused by the fuel composition).
Made some small adjustments to the materials, mainly lowerering their roughness values and increasing reflective properties.
The material of the landing struts now uses a low (8%) weighted layer of tungsten Index Of Refraction to try to give them a more painted metal appearance.
Next bit to do is adding some rivet lines to the bump maps and trying a few ideas for a stressed metal effect (the aircraft looks far to smooth lined at present).