So I was playing around with 3ds this week, still learning all of this modeling business. It seems to make great models but in the translation from importing it gets a billion (exaggeration) more polygons.



I like the turbo-smooth effect in 3ds for this little imp demon model I was making but there doesn't seem to be any practical way to get it into med without blowing up the poly count...I don't think 7k+ poly for a small rpg monster is very sound lol.



I can live with or without the over the top smoothing but even without it the poly count is crazy. I was trying to stay as simple as I could in 3ds and export as an fbx (since I'm assuming it will be easier to get animations in with the model together later on). Anyone have any good pointers on how to get neat and tidy models from max to med? Importing/exporting tips? I plan on throwing in some bones in this sucker once I finish it and doing all my animating in 3ds. I've done a few tuts on modeling, skinning, and animating directly in med but I would rather use 3ds.

I am not aware of turbo smoothing, but it sounds like, and looks like it is giving you way too many polys. Once again, I know nothing about max but I think there must be a way to work with just 1 subdivision level and switch back to the proxy model. It just comes with time and practice.

This sort of smoothing is used for static sceneries only. In 3D games normally smoothing is done just with Gouraud shading and not with lots of polgons.

Get ready for lots of work.
Use MultiRes modifier on high-poly models. Play with percentage. Then convert to mesh and adjust vertexes manually.

FOr better results, divide different parts of mesh, and MultiRes them seperately.

thank you ryu! that was exactly what I was looking for!! now I'm at somewhere around 1k total for the whole model. It works beautifully. and by the look of it I can strip a model down even further than that if I want to use it as background stuff.

So say I want to have around 10-15 creatures on the screen (at maximum) and a little bit of scenery in the battle instance, is 1-1.5k poly going to be alright? what would be a good ballpark number to try to stay under?

Well this totally depends on your target group. For any not totally aged PC 15 creatures with like 1k polies is piece of cake. If you target at old systems too (i.e. from 2002 or something) I'd stay between one and two thousand polies for each creature. If this isn't that important you easily can double the polycount and even more if you want to...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

Actually you can do it rather easily (MAX to MED) by exporting it as a .ASE file and then rigging / animating it in MED.

here's an example of a low-poly model I made last year...

http://www.newperspectivecomics.com/sitebuilder/images/grunt01-908x687.jpg

he's roughly 2000 polys and has a painted on face and a 0 (zero) setting using meshsmooth (it takes away the hard edge without adding polys).

ALSO

you got WAAAY! to many polys in your hands and head; you don't need a million polys to make a finger REMEMBER less is more!