This is a little thing I’ve been working on for the last few days. I’m being troubled about materials, b/c no matter what I do, I lose all of the details. Pleaz crit.
wow, very nice model, very clean and professional. The only flaw I can see is that the main rotor seems to be a bit thick, unless you are going with a cartoonish look…
I would texture it using UV maps, first, unwrap(archi?) the fuselage and texture that, then do all the smaller ‘accessories’ on by one.
how to keep your details sharp:
UV map your model and assign to it a basic high-res image (will be overwritten, make it just plain white for now.)
using 2.43 (only RC3 is out right now, but use it just the same), go to the bake tab (behind the tab with the ‘anim’ button) and select AO.
hit bake, the plain image will now be Ambient Occlusion baked to your plain image, save the image from the image viewer.
then, apply this to your texture, either on the color map (just use a multiply filter in any image editor) or apply directly to mesh by using multiply on ‘ref’. (note: you will have to reduce the ‘var’ amount, or it will darken it too much).
this will shadow your mesh details and make them stand out a lot.
edit: btw, could you show your textureing attemts? we could then critique them to help more…