These past two weeks I've been in a mad dash to get the model ready for texturing. Another member of our team will be unwrapping it and fixing material shader settings, etc. I actually finished last week, and used the extra time I had to redo a few areas and add detail.
According to Model Viewer, I managed to get the model down to 160,000 triangles +/- a few hundred. ED's new Su-27 is at 173K, so there is some room for improvement!
I started working on the damage model last week. I needed to sift through the old meshes and properly organize them. It's complete, but our team has a few changes that need to be made. Once that is done, I'll resume the damage model.
In the meantime, I finally dug my way through redoing the wings. There were some serious poly issues I felt needed to be fixed. Below shows the new wing on the right. All nice and smooth now! Yep, that means I had to remake the landing lights, flaps, ailerons, and gear doors too. haha. I redid a few bits on the wings' attachments too, to include the lights, sensors, actuators covers, etc.
A few last things on my To-Do List was to add more detail to the pylons. The bumps you see is what was missing. I planned on using Normal Maps to create it, but it wouldn't look right. I imported the pilot and ejection seat as well, so time can be saved unwrapping and texturing. Unwrapping a humanoid is no easy task anyways!
Nose cone's shading problem was fixed adding more segments. Usually using long quads in a cone can yield some blocky looking edges, even after a proper smoothing group is applied. In the cockpit I used a spline to recreate a deformed pipe too.
Hopefully the next update will be in a new thread featuring the texturing!