Yeah ,
Can be a great tool perhaps for people not skilled, or that don't have time to spend on character area.

And if they want standard characters , it can be a way to go, up to you to make your own personnal clothes, armor !

@BigDaz:
Could you post the polycount of your ingame character and why not a wireframe picture ?

It's the mid range model, so its about 11,000 triangles, I made the gun myself which is about 1,500.


Full Size


Full Size

holy inefficiencies batman!

yeah...lol.
you guys should check out makehuman if you are into this stuff...also use some normal maps and poly reduction 11,000...holy mole...way to much.

11,000 is way too much ... for the relatively low detail look of the model being shown. 10,000+ is considered a high-poly model for game content, so 11,000 is high and should look like the best thing out there (for all the polys being used). Look at all the wasted polys in the model's ears! Unless the game is about giving that character a physical exam, why would anyone need all those polygons there?

11000 is too much indeed!
Seeing the wireframe ther is lot lot lot of useless polygons that don't add anything to the model.
I's wasting polygons and requiring too much power for nothing.
What you can do is use a great retopology tool ,like with Blender,3D Coat or any other to remake a low poly/medium poly version fast.

An example even there i think there could be lot of optimisations on head and arams that seems to have too much polys :



But for AAA production and AAA engine, only the man characer
can reach such amount of polygons and more :


Some Gears of wars ennemies just use around 5000-6000 polygons
and they look reaaly deatailld in game with use of normal maps :
Gears Of Wars example

I think all the characters use the same base model so the number of polys is a side effect of the number of options available. You do get 4 levels of detail though which covers most needs really. You're always free to reduce polys and edit it as much as you want.

There is an other tool which can be of use for those who dont have either skill or time to create complex characters

DIGIMI by DAZ Studio

There are 3 modules : Decimator - Atlas - FBX exporter

You can import a model from the huge DAZ library , to reduce the number of polys, to create a texture suitable for a game engine (Atlas) , finally you export it to a FBX file

The beauty is that the package is optimized for the Daz models since all of them share the same UNI Mesh