Cool
Well first of all, ye isn't worth making those mounting bits, best not to make them.
The small "bumps" yes, you shouldn't model, they should be done as part of the missiles normal map, possibly a little bit of fake lighting in the diffuse map too to make the bump, although texture will probably be to low rez ingame to be able to pick them out, but ye, shouldn't be modelled.
Modelling in blender might be a problem but we will see how it goes
First of all, missile has waay too many tris, my R.530 which is a much bigger missile than this, had 12 sides on its largest part for lod0:
vBF2 AIM-9 has 10sides on its widest part although you might be able to get away with only 8, but if 8 doesn't work, 10 should really be as high as you go.
For the thins, front thins I would make 2D planes, in the refs they look very thin so no point wasting tris there, rear thins however do look to have some width so would make them in pretty much the same way I did the rear thins on the R550 here, although looking at it that edge on the right hand side should be going from the central part, down to the bottom right vert instead of the way it is..:
For the rear of the missile, you really should just have a cone going in rather than a cylinder, with a black texture in the middle gives a much more realistic feeling of depth with also using far fewer tris, as well as saving quite a bit of UV space since you should just do it as a planar UV and this also helps the LODs since then you can just easily remove the central vert and it looks pretty much the same:
Can leave the border around your end cone on lod0 but would collapse that down on lod1.
As for a tri count, anything under 200 tris is acceptable but as low as you can get it for this missile while keeping all the core details
Although the important thing is good lods, can have a detailed lod0 of 300 tris (but can't see why you need that many tris for this missile) with all the small details removed from lod1 making it ~100 tris.
Keep up the good work!
- Moved to community modding.
