Cannot solve modeling problem

G`day to everyone! I have been modeling a plane and i cannot understand how to make a soft indent on a surface of the plane. I am quite new to the modeling and this is my first works done without tutorial, so i am sure that i am missing something or doing it wrong.
As you can see in a render below, without soft indents plane model looks rough and unrealistic. I tried to bevel edges, but that resulted in glitches of the model and looked gibberish. Maybe there is an addon to solve this? Or i am missing a functionality of Blender itself?

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https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/scene_layout/object/editing/shading.html

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/modifiers/generate/subdivision_surface.html

Yeah, well. Subdiv makes model looking great, but results in circular type of cut outs on the body frame instead of just smoothig the indent itself.
And smooth shading already is applied.

Which is why you use support loops to tell the modifier which edges need to be round and which ones need to be sharp.

Hey, you can do alot of that with normal/bump(16 bit) maps on your shaders.

Did you turn Auto-smooth on? Try to adjust the angle.

Which results in enormous amout of lags if I add more than 3 loops cuts. Which is very strange, since my PC handles havier loads without problems, while this model is pretty light on the vertices.

Oh, I will try that this method as soon as I am near my PC. Thank you very much!

Yeah, already had been turned on at the moment of talking a screenshot that you can see right now.

Thank you very much for your time!

Could you take screenshot without the textures and background?

Yes, of course, in a few days a will send it in this topic. Sorry for the delay in advance!

Hi! And sorry for the delay again! Here is a screenshot as you asked:

Can you include the wireframe?

Doesn’t look like everything has the same geometry density.

Yes, of course!


uhhh and don`t mind the amount of vertices on the lower turbine, place holder for a better geometry.

Maybe you could try to put down the roughness in Material properties, and the metallic up.
Just a try.

Maybe we didn’t understand each over here. The main problem which i cannot solve is how to make smooth indents on a body of the plane (see a screenshot which i provided below, to show exactly about which indents i am talking about)

While subdiv modifier worked on a tail, as you could see on screenshots, it didn’t on the main body because of enormous lags which appears at the moment of adding more than 2 loop cuts (which is very strange as my pc can handle itself)
Bevel doesn’t work because it results in awfully bad geometry (such as overlapping of vertices, faces being inside out and etc.)
And i can`t put my finger on what to do exactly to achieve what i need.

Ahh, ok. In edit-mode select your edges you want to bevel. Assign a vertex group to this edge.
In object mode, Bevel Modifier, in Limit Method select Vertex Group and in the dropdown select the group you just assigned.
The Bevel Modifier now bevels only the group and not the whole mesh.

EDIT: Just tested a few methods. To keep polycount low, try beveling the edges in edit-mode

I don’t think you should try to model the paneling, it is better to use a normal map to fake.

The paneling or fuselage skin also rivets a certain way to the plane and depends on the shape of the frame. See this picture

I will test this method as soon as i can. Thank you very much as i didn’t even know about this!! Totally mind blown

Oh, a good catch there actually. Any way how i can normal map paneling? I know how to make textures and normal maps for generic objects like stone, grass, marble etc from photo, but don’t know about doing something like you said with these indents.
The problem with this model of the plane is that it lacks photos. It wasn’t popular model and wasn’t mass produced at that time. So i am lost here with accurate representation of details like that. That is why i thought it would be easier just to model them by hand just like i did with X-wing. The only problems was that X-wing has cubical indents and almost all IRL planes have smooth ones.