OK Am I doing it right? lol
It's an eleven tooth drive sprocket, and I reasoned initially that I needed 11 sections to model dem shapes, and wound up using 14 to get one tooth section. After duplicating it around I extruded to tighten up the edges for the smooth and the polys just seem so high. I'm new to high poly modeling and if I was doing this in a production pipeline would this get me fired? lol
Would I be expected to just add in the necessary loops to the base mesh and pull the shapes out by hand and forget about smooth on something as high poly as this?
By the time tracks are done, I expect one tread/wheel section will be upwards of two million polys.
This piece has 3872 in the base and it runs up to 61952 smoothed with two divisions, (subD preview 3 hotkey)
Replies
If you wanted to reduce anyway you could delete the flat sides and selectively polysmooth only the teeth since it is the only part that benefits, shading errors could happen on the walls seeing as they are now large N-gons but they are also planar and can be fixed by averaging the normals.
3336 triangles http://i.imgur.com/tVHzd.png
It really is a waste of time though, keep modeling the way you are :P.