Garee - that is a cool little guy!! At 24k polys he's pretty manageable, too!

Yes, this is one of the big problems I'm trying to figure out (poly count) because I don't want anyone to see any "angles" on anything I make. Seeing the sharp angles on what should be a smooth curve immediately takes the viewer out of the image with the realization that its fake.

Here's what's going on way in the background with WHY I'm doing this - I do FX for low-budget movies, and I make shorts whenever I can 9trying to make the jump into low-budget feature filmmaking), and things need to look REAL, and what that translates to for film and video is a high poly count as well as large textures. I want to get more into character creation and animation - doing monsters for movies, basically.

Keeping in mind I'm using C4D and XSI - and the guys I work with use Max and Maya - poly count isn't much of an issue for us until it gets REALLY high - into the 400k and above range per character, and we still have 200k or above scenery they're running around in if it's not in footage.

But in practicing, I figure I can make my stuff for sale if I think it's good enough (and right now my goat-head guy is NOT good enough - that's gonna be a freebie) - but the trick in making them for sale is the majority of buyers will be using Poser, so it needs to be managable for THEM (by hitting "Page Down" in Mudbox it un-subdivides the mesh). I can export the surface details as a Normal Map, make the mesh lower poly, and hopefully you won't see the difference.

Okay, take a looksie at the attachment to see what I'm getting at. The one on the left, while nice, is not realistic. For that you need better defined creases, wrinkles, muscle development, etc. (as well as a better texture and lighting, but I'm not gonna get into that - this is about polys and sculpting). The one on the RIGHT is what I'm aiming for - and this is gonna take a higher poly count I think.

Thoughts?
-Lew ;-)