Thanks everybody for the comments and words of encouragement. I'll definitely be looking into the points mentioned by you guys.

@Spike: Hehehe^^

@Ghost: You do have good point ofcourse about polycount, but that is something that requires not to0 much extra work (my problem is that I love the previous generation too much - blocky characters are really cool^^). I'd definitely like to look into the normal and specular map thing (though not a programmer by nature I'd appreciate it if someone could furnish me with a nice set of project files where all I've gotta do is add the model and aply an action to it and press build and run to see if the normal and specular maps are looking good)

Hopefully I can get on with the models at the end of the week so I can try and implement some of the comments and continue on with the third version of the knight.