It's been cute watching people of late with these threads like "Look at my great new model", but it's time to put an end to this crap clouding up a forum of which I'm a part also. If you like your house in a mess that's fine but dang it if I gotta live next to you clean up your yard and quit throwing crap out there that the whole community has to look at. I'm going to get to why you cant use these programs in just a few lines, but I want to say first and foremost there is no shortcut to modeling unless your buying a low poly model from like Turbo Squid or something.
I hear of this program or something called "MakeHuman" or whatever and though I don't have it, or use it if it's an online deal, I'm betting that a Daz model from Poser is about the equivalent so that's what I'll be using for this demonstration.
Below I've imported a model into 3ds max 8. Not only the industry standard but as expensive and good as anything you may be using. The model is 143,234 faces which is probably a middle of the road number for any high poly model.
I'm going to use "Polygon Cruncher", which a $119.00 plugin for 3dmax from Mootools and probably as good or better then anything your going to use. If you happen to own 3dmax you can also use the "optimize" modifier but you wouldn't be able to hit a targeted poly count like you would in PC.
With that said lets lower the poly count a little and look at what's happening.
Ok there we seen that at 7018 poly's, which is still way to many for a game, our nice lines are already disappearing and the continuity of the model is already being compromised. Yes...if at this many poly's, you got it in a game all animated it would, more then likely, still move ok cause there's so many poly's that the shins and thighs and forearm and biceps area still have have enough poly's that when the elbow or knee bends it wont effect all the poly's in the center of these groups.
Lets look at 1800 Poly's which is a count that at least this engine can more then deal with, and if you pay attention(which I realize some of you don't) is kinda the bar we shoot for.
Ok above we see what I like to call "sharding". This is when poly's of what is going to be the joints of your animated model extend into parts that shouldn't actually move when the knees or elbows are bent. Now, you can take it down to this level of detail and sit all night straightening things up and placing cuts with a slice plane to make the joints right again or.....
...now pay attention...
You can model the right way from the start. Now I realize this is a shock to your system but there is actually resources of great quality outside this forum and easily accessible. I know allot of people on this forum love to box model and I've seen a few tutorials which are kinda decent and they produce results that are fine and animate ok. My preference is not to box model, and I used the tutorial in the following link when I started working on organic modeling. It had been a long time since I'd seen this tutorial and I see actually I should revisit it myself as I didn't rotate things quite like how it was shown. This tutorials been up at least 2 years.
http://www.3dtotal.com/team/Tutorials/benmathis/benmathis_1.asp
OK, and here's the "soon to be" sexy mummy I'm working on and although my model verts are not rotated exactly like the model in that mans tutorial the integrity of the body shapes are conveyed and followed. I get my direct center line...and apex that divides front from back and texturing my models is always a breeze.
So in closing......you wont lower the count...you wont use models that are more then 5k in a game so you may as well learn your craft and quit tring to take shortcuts.
NOTE: these high poly models are great to make resource models so you have a shape to model your low poly version to.
