hey trav, as u know im into low poly right now. i spent my entire modeler life looking for details no matter what and ended up with thousands of polys. no problem at all. i really enjoy the results and everything. but then i started to pay attention in other people works and in my own work and i could see a lot of unnecessary poly all over the mesh and i decided to try a low poly mesh, just to see if i could..and i did! i guess the ideal mesh is the one with details and lots of polys in the right place and where you can save polys..save them! thats why i try to avoid bandsaw, for example, and build poly by poly, paying attention where i can save extra polys... and there is the animation issue.. i have a p3 850 with 512 ram and a gforce2mx card and a high res model really slow things in a very annoing way. my guess in that in most cases a good number for a complete character is around 5.000 1.000 polys with a lot of details (wrinkles, clothes, props, etc.). about hte tex maps, ive been testing it and a great way to avoid stretching is to create all the base tex with procedurals uv maps (try iris, its a standalone app to create procedural tex) and then only fine detail with image maps(veins, lips bumps, etc)and a lot of gradient maps with incidence angle.. but im not sure of anything i said before!!! im still learning all that 3d stuff so my oppinion might change 30 minutes later. thats what i think right now:) see ya.