Progress!

I know I said I'd be starting on the cockpit, but, I haven't! In an effort to prevent modelling burnout, I decided to have a little play with textures over the Christmas period. That led to me unwrapping and baking the afterburner section of the engine, which in turn led me to find better reference photos, which then led to me rebuilding the afterburner sections!

A lot of the 3D detail in the engine is hidden in the darkness, until the afterburner lights up. You'll have to bear with some what in this regard though, I'll come back to these and play with some nice afterburner flame effects at a later date. Images are from AC3D only at this stage.

Whilst there is a LOT of 3D detail in this afterburner section, I have also used a baking technique to add the perforations in each vapour gutter, which probably saved a few thousand vertices.

I might start on the cockpit next, but I might delay it a little further to sort out all of the external lighting. I need to experiment with translucent light lenses and also with placing and customising X-Plane lights. This will have to be done for both version 9 and 10 of course too, so a fair amount of time involved.

There is a method to my madness though, I'd like to have ALL of the exterior model finalised before doing the cockpit. Stay tuned to see which area I get to next!