About quality, you need to think "final" product... i don't know if you segment/UV/texture yourself your models but some details can be made via texture work...

by example, you have a lot of gun with numerous barrels... it is possible to make the "inside" of barrels via normal map... will spare only a few poly by barrel by since the huge amount of gun/barrels...

Or on both side, at the back of the model, you have a trench with panel... for the smallest one, it is possible to make it via texture too...

Anyway, your models are great... if they don't make it in sins due to poly limit, maybe they will make it in sins 2 !!!

Or maybe you have a early version with fewer poly... i don't know how you work but in my case, i always start with a "3D sketch" who is low poly ( 1 or 2k poly )... by example, take a look for the sharlin that i have made for the B5 mod... http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_EpX6GUNLABE/SrbZuvscp0I/AAAAAAAAAME/pnOM-Of7G8g/s1600-h/sharlin.jpg ... fight model on the left, second stage on the right... one more stage at http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_EpX6GUNLABE/StnQ4zOdABI/AAAAAAAAAV8/cdTuJlgy0hM/s1600-h/sharlin_11.5k_tri.jpg ... in game result at http://babylon5ins.blogspot.com/2010/04/b5-s0tyr-sharlintex-update.html ... as you can see the texture work from Tobi and Steiner have greatly improve the details of my model...

In short, if you have somebody who texture your models, it is a good idea to ask your texturer about what details can be made via texture work... it will allow to optimize the model without loss of quality in the final result...

Thanks on behalf of SteinerX and me for the texture (though most of the work for the texture was done by SteinerX)

As a side note, remember that the more polygons you add, the more difficult it will be to layout, segment and optimise your UV, and less detail will be available for the texture (as the UV needs more space, the UV pieces become smaller) and textures above 2k x 2k seem to be too much for sins (considering ram usage).

Other than that, impressive work!

"The belly is a bit bare and the tier 2 upper section and engines need work but I'm almost at 50k polies already. I'll have to split this into two pieces (one a particular mesh) for sins if I wanted to put it in. The prospect of that isn't nearly as terrifying as the amount of helper copy-pasting I'd need to do for the guns."

given that the game works in a 2-d fashion, I don't think the bare belly is an issue. It looks amazing. There are quite a few models here that are just awe inspiring.

You make my point... your work is usually related to baking AO... it seem a detail but it improve greatly the visual in the game, specially with a game limited to Phong node who in theory don't allow it...

For people who don't know what AO is, simply go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_occlusion ... usual texture in sins will look like the "diffuse only" pic on the wikipedia page... after Tobi work, it look like the "combined ambient and diffuse"... it is, i think, a great improvement...

SteinerX is the artist for texture, you are the technician... technic who need a lot of computer resource... resource who have push you recently to buy a new powerful computer... baking the AO map don't take anymore a few days now !!!

Anyway, it show only one thing... nobody is good at everything but team work can lead to great result...

Never knew anything about baking AO. So you can't overlap UV's for that, then?

Man, that introduces some enormous complications for my architectural modeling plans in particular...

@Mansh00ter
Second that. You can optimise your UV's but you have to overlay symmetrical parts pixel-perfect to avoid artifacts. Other parts that seem not to benefit from AO can have that part of the AO erased if you bake the AO into an own image and combine it later (e.g an overlaying layer in Photoshop using multiply) So you can specify the Amount of AO (and therefore UV separation/optimisation) for your texture. Difficult and tedious but in the end worth it. The better you optimise, the more AO and the more texture space. But ultimately it's always a bit of a trade-off.

@IskatuMesk
Ambient Occlusion is a mathematical approximation of Global Illumination using a perfectly round and evenly lit sky sphere.

apperently in xsi you cant export a model if it is above 30k tris either is there a way around this i made a ship but it got messed up when i reduced the tris

Here are some wireframe shots of the latest model I'm working on:

Around 7000 polygons, a bit higher than the norm for vanilla models, but the overall faction design alows for this (the faction this ship belongs to can have only half the normal number of ships built).

Generally speaking, if you are building a game model, absolutely avoid using extremely high polygon models. For Sins, regardless of faction design, I would avoid going above 10 000 polygons. If your model has more than that, consider building a low poly version of it, then baking high poly detail onto the low poly one via normal map.

Looking great ManShooter!  And yes, building a high poly model and using the bake on a lower poly model is exactly how we would do it.

Polygons definitely don't effect performance that much anymore. Unless sins is a special exception for some reason I've never run into yet,  I never had any issues putting high poly stuff into the game. The only thing I'd be concerned about is the extra ram usage, but come the next update and that wouldn't be an issue. I don't care about performance on low-end systems, though. I cannot stand low detail stuff, and I cannot texture, so there you go. Geometry instancing and other new fancy stuff would trivialize raw poly counts even further.

Cutting the mesh apart and spawning particle meshes for the other pieces was going to be how I was going to do it.

My next model update project will probably be the Glecterror. I posted it here a long time ago but here it is for reference.

This is amongst the most difficult of my current Xy`Kranasha designs in my head to model. I kitbashed the original back in 2002, later making no less than 3 attempts to model it from scratch in 2008. This model is a revised version of one of those remodel attempts. When I come to it next I will be removing those gun platforms (you'd have a hard time pointing something that massive at a star much less at most of the ships the other races use), and trying to detail the hull, as well as optimizing.

Minus those bottom cannons the entire ship is only 11k quads which is remarkably tiny.

I'm definitely not a professional. Any and all of my modeling methodology would make someone actually legitimately experienced in the art cringe and vomit. But I do what is necessary to move forward.

Regards.

High poly models are only worth it if you're really using the polies for something. Proper edgeflow is really important.

Well, Thoumsins Sharlin has about 15k triangles and that seems to be no problem for a capitalship, since you can only have very few of those. I suppose even 30k is no problem if you can only ever have one or two of them.

The resources will be similar, it's just a method to get past the game crashing from the limit. Supposedly, anyways, I never actually tried it.