Yeah, no, no changes made, and this goes for you Dave, too, if you read this - I'm not forgetting, or neglecting the suggestions that everyone has made on this. It's just that Im just playing with ideas at the moment, I started this picture to try and get an idea of how I could create a background for an animation, because my main goal is to animate this helicopter. If I make this into a 'final image' in itself, then I will go back and remodel, and re-render out, particularly, as Dave said, there is no front wheel(!). Then, I will put in the DOF, colour corrections, lower reflections etc. Probably wont get a chance now to do any extra/re-modelling till wednesday. I also need to do more texturing, and I want to lower the reflection on that airvent on the side, thats way too bright. Alot of the colours in this come from whacking the colour gain on the IBL up to 10, and I will possibly bring that down a notch ot two also. And do an AO pass.

I agree with you about the fatness of the body, and pulling it out a bit at the bottom to add some 'weight'. I was actually working along those lines when I modelled the original, but it was causing some wierd, not massive, but just not very good-looking creases. If I put them back in they might not show up so bad now it's all textured up though.

I was trying to set up the rotor blades last night, following the apache tutorial on here...never used expressions before. The idea is to use a bend deformer, and expressions, so that, when the helicopter is stationary the rotors curve down, like in the pic, but then when the throttle (custom attribute on the helicopter) goes up, the blades straighten out. It was all working fine, except at the end it came out backwards, so, when the throttle was at 0, the blades were straight, then as the throttle increased, and the blades spun, the blades curved down.

Think the problem was with the initial bend handle setup