Just to reassure those of you with a "poly concern" ..... here's the process I use the reduce polygon count to the bare minimum.
It's in no way intended as a tutorial, just a rough outline of the process.
I'll be demonstrating on a toolbox I modelled for the Marussia 2013 garage, here's the victim....
4,808 faces...you could make a track with that
And I'll be turning it into this..... 66 faces.
I use the "Projection" feature of the Render to Texture process ( aka "Bake" ) in 3ds Max, to "Project" the high poly detail onto a low poly mesh.
First thing is to grab a box and throw a chamfer on the edges and position it as close to the high poly without overlap, I've gone overkill on the chamfer because this helps smooth out corners in the RTT proces and can easily be reduced at the final stage, current face count is 170.
Then I unwrap the mesh to make sure there's no stretching of the texture....
Basically I'm just flattening out the mesh...and overlaying a 2d texture.
Now I render out the texture using the newly created UVW map.....as you can see it picks up whatever materials you have applied to your model, diffuse/bump, lighting/shadows, reflections/refractions & specular and flattens them out into a 2d texture.
Then I render out an Ambient Occlusion pass.......
.....and combine them in Photoshop, this basically adds depth to the texture, similar to shadows, but not quite.
So from 4,808 polygons/faces, to 170 polygons/faces, and after removing a few loops we finally end up with..... 66 polygons/faces and still have all the detail.
A bit rough at the edges, I've done no post work on the texture, missed out a ton of steps and used pretty low render settings, which is why the texture is a bit "noisy" but that's the basics of what I do....so no worries about polygons, if anyone mentions polycount again..... I'll beat them to death with my keyboard
F1Dev