Turn a Kit-bash concept into a video game ready prop ?

Chef_0f_J0EY_SH3rWay

Hello everyone. I hope you are all doing well. 
In this post, I wanna ask about the process of turning a kitbashed-concept art into a game-ready prop. 
The mechanical guts of the drone (see in 2 pictures above) are kinda dense and detail for a game prop. I intend to UV unwrap this drone for texturing in Substance Painter but I don't know what I should be doing with all the mechanic detail.

Eric Chadwick

I bet you want a clear ruleset to apply for situations like this, but there isn't one. Too many unknown factors. How big is this relative to the player? How close does the camera get on average? How much does the player interact with it? What kind of game is it? What is the customer hardware target?

The best experience is to try it yourself. Limit yourself to optimizing just a small segment of the interior, so it goes quicker, and bake from high to low, finishing the material, and viewing in-engine from typical gameplay distances.

Examine existing games to see how much detail they use, and where they make tradeoffs.

This will give you a first-hand experience with how well (or not) these kinds of decisions work. 

Chef_0f_J0EY_SH3rWay

I only want to texture it and share it on social platforms like Sketchfab where people can inspect my model. 

Alex_J

I was going to say something but Eric said it much better. 

Still I make a small suggestion: 

Use a simple circle shaped ring to bake that highlighted part onto. Take that into your render engine, view it like the end user would. Then you only need to add geometry to support the silhouette (if you determine necessary). My guess is that you may want a simple rectangle shape to capture each of the larger repeating pieces, but the smaller indentions can be handled by the normal map. In total this could be ~10k tris for an LOD0, but could get down to ~1 - 5k tris for lower LODs.

If you don't have some technical target, just invent one. It is better than being aimless. For instance, go on one of the model ripper sights and you can pull up some models from the latest star wars game. Something similar to this model. YOu can study that, then say in your sketchfab viewer "I made this model to conform to modern AAA shooter technical standards."