modelling questions/concerns

[ade2004wally]

As an aspiring game designer who is still a student I have a few questions/concerns on the modeling pipeline. In this case for weapons. So far it seems everyone who has looked at my poly count fr an M203 weapon I am modeling says it's way too high.(These are people who have never modeled anything in 3D before). As seen in the picture below right now it's at 30556 polys and it's not even finished yet. And the polycount goes up when I add smoothing to the weapon. (meshsmooth with 2 iterations)

pre smooth picture(main part f gun with holes already smooth because I had to apply the boolean):
http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i295/ade2004/3D%20Models/m2031.png

smooth picture:
http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i295/ade2004/3D%20Models/m2032.png

I believe I have done a good job of modeling efficiently, but I get discouraged by the people saying my polycount is to high. This leads me to my question, will there be some kind of poly reduction process in the pipeline? Right now I am not following any tutorials in making this weapon so I really don't know what to think at this point.


Where can I suggest new tutorial videos? I would really like to suggest the production pipeline for modeling weapons in games. I also have the 2011 educational 3ds max so the tutorial doesn't have to be with the 2010 version.

Thanks in advance.

[libertycityanimation]

if your poly are too high then add an optimise modifer this will reduce the amount of polys in your scene. there are tuts a all over the web. We cannot name site's DT does not like it.

the first image is with a lot of polys the second one is when i added the optimise modifer

[dan]

Hello ade2004wally! The model is coming along pretty well! You can suggest courses over here: Training Requests (http://digitaltutors.zendesk.com/forums/114125/entries).

In the mean time, have you tried checking out the Creating Game Characters in 3ds Max 2011 and ZBrush (http://www.digitaltutors.com/09/training.php?cid=29&pid=481) course? That course goes through the process of taking a high resolution character with over 20,000,000 polys and lowering it to about 8,000 triangles by rebuilding low resolution geometry around it. I think you'd get a lot of great tips and techniques for ways to lower the resolution of your geometry in that course, but you're always welcome to submit a course suggestion also! Happy modeling!

[ade2004wally]

Thanks guys. I already had my eye on that new max 2011 training. I'll check that out as soon as I'm done.