This is a rocket ship I did and I was wondering if there was a way to cut back some of the geometry on it. The problem is that it is skinned so i can't get rid of to much. I included a pic of the bone structure so you can see what i'm working with. If you have ideas on where i can cut back or even a more optimal way to skin it I'd like to hear it.
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The "fins" also appear to be adding a lot of unnecessary geometry, but that can largely depend on what you plan on using this particular model for. If it's for a real-time environment, I'd lose every second loop on each fin, or potentially even more. It would cut the polygon count of those fins in half.
I'd also suggest deleting the faces of the "thrusters" that are colliding with the inside of the ship. They won't be seen, because they are behind other geometry, and they're really adding quite a few extra polygons.
This object is really quite simple, if you break it down into pieces. You can afford to lose some of the silhouette, because a texture is what will really make it "pop." I'll do a quick paintover to show you what I mean.
I apologize for the sloppy job. I didn't have a whole lot of time to do it, as I'm going out soon. I hope this better illustrates my points.
If you were to just get rid of the other unnecessary loops, I think you'd be fine. I don't really see much reason to get rid of more geometry, in a case like this. If you're trying for really low poly, you'd have to lose some of the silhouette to keep it deforming well. Or you could keep the silhouette, losing the deformation. This is why low-poly modeling can be hard.
The caps of the cylinders can be reduced; instead of having all edges meed at a point int he middle, delete those edges and manually cut in the triangles, cutting across the cap.
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Poly efficient, yeah. But having that center point there is actually really useful for UVs and texturing.