I don´t see a problem with even more polygons, BUT if you use that "many", there have to be a lot more details than there are at the moment.
I always give the advice: "Use as many polygons as needed, but as few as possible." If really needed, I don´t see a problem with even 20k polygons, but then you really have to see that there are that many. At the moment it looks as if it could be done with just about 2k, and it would still look nearly the same.

oops my bad lol, blonde moment :A

And yeah more details on the model would improve it loads

slin hit the nail on the head, dj, i believe your the one that i made that real quick knight in armor model for. if you remember I made approximately the same look in a dramatically lower amount of poly's and that was just a quick few minutes doing it. The model itself looks cool, but you should look at your cylinders and say, "will i really be able to see the difference once its textured between a 10 sided cylinder and a 20 sided cylinder?".

keep up the work though.

Ya, i was the one who made the knight model a while back, but I think I have learned a bit more since then. I went through and looked at the model and have found many places were it would be easy to remove polys and it would still look the same. I'll post some pics sometime soon showing the model lower poly to see what you all think it then.

DG

Hopefully the next big model I make, I won't need the community to point out the same issue i keep having =]

Great news! I found a tool in the model editor i use that lets you merge all coplanar faces in the model. I used it on the model and it cut the poly count down more than half! So now the count is 5197 faces ^^. I think i could probably go in and manually remove some others if that count is still too high. But here is a picture of the wire frame now -



edit: realized that i forgot to include the helmet...the helmet by it self is around 2.9k polys! This is mainly due the the tubes I put in that go from the back to the front, and I was wondering if there was a better way to have them.

here is a close up pic of the helmet to show what i mean



DG

why are you using sooo many polys on it? the tube could have about 1/8th as many polygons.

ya thats the problem...I think I should re-do it with a 5 sided cylinder. Lol i really should keep these in mind while i model instead of after.
DG

... and you should decide where the cylinder is straight and where it gets a curve to reduce the count of segments at the straight parts to only one.

EDIT:
This is a good point where you should change the modeling tool.
Try blender, look at the video tutorials of Nowherebrain and ventilator, and the huge number of explanations at blender.org.
As a low start you can download the small text file in my signature.

uhm.. let him model with as many polys as he wants...

The only thing he needs to do is, to run a polycount-cutter after finishing the basic model...

I have tried blender..and well, i dont think that is the modeling program for me =P. I use Carrarra 5 Pro for modeling, but I cant seem to find where it gives the poly count...lol.

@ Pappenheimer - what do you mean by keeping the straight part segments to one, the tube is supposed to be like this ` http://www.vancooten.com/images/vacuum%20cleaner%20tube.jpg

And thank you to everyone for your good advice and comments =]