Realistic Airplane

[angel]

There is no better way to have realistic textures for an airplane than UV unwrapping your model and painting textures for it. Get good references of the airplane and paint diffuse, spec, ref. textures etc. Depending on your intended purpose you might have to paint rather big textures to get all the details in and you will need the details to "sell it".

When you are done with your texturing job then work on the lighting to get a realistic look. Your current light rig is good for test rendering only, I'm affraid.

[FaintLight]

You need reflection from HDRI, and if you got machine power, HDRI based lighting
(if you care about matching with background).
Surely, you also need nice texturing and modeling.
Be careful your model is very smooth, coz any unnatural bump on your model produce
non-realistic reflection.
If you are using Maya, I reccomend you to start your modeing with Nurbs.
and use that model as guide for polygonal or SubD modeling.

[Quickel]

you definitely need some reflectivity in there. i can only speak for 3d max if you're using that - check out a plane i'm working on here - http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=43&t=459678

the shader's a little intense with a mask shader being used - one layer is the paint shader which is a raytrace material using HDRI in the environment channel. the other layer in the mask shader is a bare metal texture. the mask is a black and white map painted which separates the two. i hope this makes sense. good luck!

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