Hey, here to give you some tips and tricks and hopefully help you improve. Reference here.
So, lets get started:
1. Whenever you're looking at your model in a program, (in this case I used p3d itself) If you turn on smoothing or subdivisions, it's a quick way to check your vertices for doubles or floating verts. These will appear as spikes flying inward or outward from your model, seen in the first image. It's quite easy to fix these issues by merging double vertices, or deleting disconnected ones. Most programs these days have a clean-up option, to allow for these errors to automatically deleted or fixed, but in some cases they don't, so it's important to recognize how to fix it manually.
2. Your UV mapping is extremely important to manage, the lower two images clearly show that both the UV scale (size of squares) and unwrapping (how the squares stretch, well, lack thereof). It's super important to unwrap your components to be as flat as possible. Think of it like making a pattern out of paper or cloth, you want it to be as relaxed as possible. Unwrapping cylinders properly will give you a shape that is a rectangle with circular end-caps, usually in two separate pieces.
3. Polygon detail and efficiency. Where is it? It's quite common to have faces you don't actually need because they don't add detail. 5-gons or N-gons (polygon subdivisions that share more than 4 vertices) are the bane of UV unwrapping, and poly count. Regardless if your faces count is low, these "N-gons" will be triangulated regardless. To be efficient, you will need to manually add edges to bridge these areas, and it's beneficial to add detail where these bridges are required. For instance, if you subdivide a cube to have 4 faces on the front, you will need 4 faces on all sides to maintain your clean quads, however, if you fail to add detail, those polygons are wasted. You may as well remove the subdivision, and save the extra 6 polygons per side (2 tris per subdivision).
4. NORMALS!!! OKAY! This is one my personal peeves as I've fought this issue on my own for hours. So, an object in a modeling or rendering program has a property called "normals" per face. It has the inside normal, and the outside. The outside normal is what is drawn, and what contains the texture property, and the inside normal is, by default, no-draw or void. Even in p3d, you'll see; well, wont see, these faces. They will be automatically hidden. Modeling software, no matter what you use will have a recalculate normal/reverse normals tool. This is literally essential, so unless you're using a modeling program from 1990, you'll have something along those lines. (Autodesk 1983 introduced this tool as standard, as wire-framing was no longer the limit of 3 dimensional design) You can usually materialize your normals to see them as a different shade, but if not, simply upload the model to p3d and look for holes.
Those are some of the most important things I've come up with, other than that, I'd focus your content on what you can imagine and bridge it to what already exists. Take your time doing UV, stretching textures takes a lot away from your detail. Here's my most recent model for reference.
![[Image: jKk7NOg.png]](http://i.imgur.com/jKk7NOg.png)
![[Image: 1iGGFXz.gif]](http://i.imgur.com/1iGGFXz.gif)
