A few questions on making meshes

[09nephilim]

I'm using the newest version of Blender, making some buildings to get up to scratch with using the software. I'm mostly ok but there are a few bits of info I could use-

 

What's the most polygons I should use on a mesh? If I go overboard will it lag up the game? I've made a head for a creature that I want to use, but the head alone was using almost 64,000 polygons... cut it down to about 16000 now but its ugly as sin...

Ok I realised the spheres I was using for eyes had a ridiculous number of polys, removing em brings me down to about 3000 polys.

 

What's the best way to go about creating creatures? How do I get the eyes to move properly and the jaw to move, etc.

 

How do I create custom animations, like the little insect swarm thingy that surrounds spriggans.

 

Any help would be much appreciated :)

Edited May 2, 2012 by 09nephilim

[ghosu]

I've seen no "official comment" to polygon maximum, highest model i tried was 100k+ and made no problems - and my rig is veeery old (E6400 2,14GhZ),2GB Memory, Radeon 5770).

 

But there was a maximum NifSkope can handle, search function may reveal this number...64k only for the head is pretty high though, you should use normal maps to come out with a few k polygons.

Edited May 2, 2012 by ghosu

[steve40]

How do I create custom animations, like the little insect swarm thingy that surrounds spriggans.

 

I think that's just a particle effect. You can do that in the CK using the ShaderEffect forms (if my memory serves me right the left side of the form has membrane shader settings and the right side of the form is for Particle effect settings) either via a script (<shader>.Play(<target>)) or via a MagicEffect added to a Spell or Ability. The latter have drop-down lists that let you choose shaders for various things like the hit impact effect, casting effect and so on.