so}{eil, keep up the good work, i would suggest till you get a decent Materials Library, you also explore texture mapping.
no doubt that materials give a model a very realistic reflective, light absorbent surface, for graphics purposes obviously one needs to have a bigger materials stock and would need very detailed work. Results are amazing.
get hold of Adobe Photoshop, there are tons of images that you can tweak and then later use for your aircraft concept models.
you would be able to give our images very realistic look then use then for texture mapping.
A little insight into Physics engines and building environments to test aerodynamics
when you start working on Physics engine it would be a all together different game. in physics engine you would need to program real environment, air, wind , pressure, gravity , thrust, drag, collision detection... list goes on and on.
Then it you would not be worrying about how beautiful aesthetically the 3D model looks. You will be exploring how well it performs.
I only managed to make a game like aircraft simulator with collision detection. It could take any 3D max model of an aircraft within parameters of my scales and use it in my aircraft sim. (i would say basic stuff –before someone starts making fun of me :p)
It takes many months if not years to make a small basic decent physics engine. One can start with only modelling (programming) wind its behaviour, air pressure etc. It would be your virtual wind tunnel.
If you know some programming then start looking into Direct X 8 onwards Library SDK (software dev Kit), you would need to use visual studio6 C++, OpenGL is a good library for Java platform.
