A brief history of developement

OK, let's have a brief summary of what I've got so far ... I started the development in 2011 with great enthusiasm. I had got the model in PlaneMaker put together pretty quickly, although I will probably be doing some more fine-tuning at this area in the future. It only had some basic painting from PlaneMaker, not so much to look at, I guess, and I will be redoing the exterior model in Blender when I'm done and happy with the interior.

Anyway, I had got it up and flying in X-Plane 9 back then with 2D cockpit (not gonna show you - that was just too bad ... :))

After that, I jumped at modeling 3D cockpit in Blender, I was a complete novice in Blender, but thanks to many great tutorials on the Internet - Dan Klaue, Blender guru (thanks guys - you've really done a great job) and many others, I managed to propel myself on the steep Blender learning curve and I have learnt a great deal since then. Here we can see a few stages of interior (and my :) ) development:

After that, there was a break - about a year long - when I didn't do any work on the modeling at all - I think it had something to do with me being pretty bad in time planning and managing my long term projects. I do other things, for sure, but I just need to work on my time management ... Nevertheless, enough of boring you with my personal reflections - I've got back at working on this project about 2 months ago and hopefully this time I will get it done ... :)
After getting back with the development process, and perhaps as a result of certain time distance I've got from my initial enthusiasm and excitement of seeing some results - when I looked at it again  - I was happy with it, certainly started to look like the real thing, well sort of ... :).

Reality check: still a long way to go, but at least it doesn't look like an arcade game plane from the 80's any more. Sorry about that dirty canopy - I think we washed it afterwards ... :)

but as you can perhaps see using the photos of the real thing for making the instruments was surely not such a good idea, it has too much of sun reflections, sometimes it's taken from a bad angle and it generally does not look good. My more experienced friends were advising me against this approach, and they were right, photo textures just look too greasy. So, what came next was making the textures for the instruments from scratch in some (preferably vector) graphic editor - I will write about it in the next post. Also - you see that I did not pay much attention to the materials so far, so they only have some basic colors and textures, so that's what will also come next, after I am done with the instruments ...