LE [Help] First time making armour, need some things awnsering

[Horkerkiin]

Hi to anyone still here not sure how busy this section is nowadays, I will try to keep this brief but apologies in advance if this turns into a wall I want to be as descriptive as possible so I can help you to help me (I feel there is a song there somewhere but im not sure).

So I'm making my first Armour mod, modelling it myself etc - I have been using this guide http://wiki.tesnexus...Part_1#Overviewand while its kinda barebones its given me the information I need to get started and get to where I am, it was also the only sort of guide I could find to making Armour.

First I'd like to know If I went about this the right way, I'm making the Armour for UNPB, so I took the body of UNPB through nifskope and into Blender as per the guide I removed the skeletons and then went on to create my Armour around the body - result
http://imgur.com/kNHsOU9
http://imgur.com/liiCd92
http://imgur.com/v13BGum
http://imgur.com/ATBaQ1d

Personally, I thought it looked great, I was really proud of what I'd made considering Id never done it before. Here in lies where I'm at currently with my problems. The poly count is WAY to [censored] high, we are talking over 1 mil high. As im sure anyone who knows what they are doing here realizes I used subsurf which while it makes a great mesh will never run in Skyrim. I dont know what to do, everytime I try and reduce the poly count I destroy the mesh and it looks terrible. Im not even sure what is the highest poly count somone would want to look at for Skyrim, ive spoken to another modder whose Armour was just short of 40K poly's.

I havnt even started weighting or UV mapping or getting a texture because im stuck here, Ive heard of baking and I think I vaguely understand what it is but im not 100% and bearing in mind im totally new to all this as well.

Can anyone help point me in the right direction?

[ScrollThief84]

This might help you lower your poly count: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?219223-How-to-lower-poly-count This is in assumption that you are using Blender 2.49b. Just read down through the post's, there aren't that many.

[Horkerkiin]

Thanks, will have a look at that decimate modifier.

 

Any other hints/tips welcome!

[dcieve]

I'm assuming that you're not using sculpt mode and modelled the whole thing using vertex/bridge/face tools. You should learn how to do sculpt in blender. It's far easier using this once you've gotten the hang of it.

 

Anyway, here's a bit of advice if you're not using the decimate modifier:

 

First, you need to remove any vertexes that are not visible. As for the cape, you can remove the inner face and make the mesh double-sided in the object properties (if I'm not wrong). Now you don't need to model the arrow emboss on the armguard or any other emboss you did, this can be done using normal map. But since you have done it anyway just leave it for now.

I haven't tried this yet but assuming you haven't applied the subsurf modifier yet, you can bake the normal maps first and decrease the subsurf value to retain the detail when lowering the poly count. But, you'll need to UV unwrap the model first. This is difficult to do if the subsurf has already applied. You'll want to watch some youtube tutorial on UV wrapping.

It worked well for me using the multi-res modifier, i dunno about subsurf tho. Just make sure to make some backups.

Honestly I recommend you to redo the whole thing using sculpt + multi-res modifier. It gave me less problems with poly counts.