When I finished blocking out the basic shape I changed my blueprints to photos.
I had some real trouble with the pipe. I was trying to model it at Uni but it was giving me some strange results. I used curve+extrude technique for it and it was alright on the outside but inside it was giving star-shape faces. But when I tried doing same thing at home everything worked well, so I don't know what was the problem.
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My second problem was that I set Extrude Tool to 5 divisions and forgot to set it back to 1. As a result every time I extruded something I was getting much more faces than I expected, I thought it was some kind of glitch and was just manually deleting nasty edges and faces...lost so much time.
Like here, simple box but 192 Tris and that nasty edge/face. At least now I know what is the cause and how to fix it.
Considering Wheels I decided to make holes and bold on normal map so I created nice curved in surface, I think normals will look good on it.
I was struggling with the front wheel, wasn't sure hot to make teeth on it because I was almost out of polygons. Matt suggested making plane faces to save poly-count and it worked really well I think.
Here is the weird thing that was in front of FV432. It has some holes in it but not all the way through the armor. On one fancy FV432 I saw torch lights put in it, however I am not sure if that is correct use for it.
I made the overall shape and decided to make holes illusion with normal+specular maps to save some polies.
For my handles I used three-sided polygons and was actually surprised that it looks really well, this is because they are very thin, the thinner is pipe the less divisions it need.
