So as promised, here's the first part of the my work log.
To start things off, I went googling for a clear set of 3-view diagrams of the P-26. I then cut up the 3-view into top, side and front images which I mapped onto similar sized rectangle objects in META. I then arranged the rectangles to form this 'skeleton':
In making the parts that comprise the airplane, I took the approach that a kid would do when creating complex objects using play-doh. Basically, you create small blobs of basic shapes and put them together.
So I start with a low-poly shape for the fuselage:
Following the same principles, I made the other low-poly blobs of remaining parts. Here's a shot of the various parts of the model as low-poly objects:
When you put these together, you'll get this:
The next step would be to convert the low-poly objects into actual wireframes. From there, I'll simplify and finetune the objects.
I'll cover that in my next post.