Interesting discussion, but IMO it depends too much on context. What I can tell you is: You DO NOT need to merge it all. With time and some mistakes you'll learn what to merge, what to intersect and what to float.
Ditto it's too busy and hard to find your work. There are loads of portfolio templates floating around if you are not a PHP expert. If you want to use Wordpress, you can do a lot more with it, just by making everything simpler.
Messer is no term for anything special tho, it simply says "Knife" in German, usually reffered to eating utensil knifes, so this is the same if you would name a AK74 as "Weapon" Looks nice, it seems to be floating on the first pic tho
a dongle would be better - you could still upgrade your hardware, and it wouldn't require an all-the-time online DRM solution either. Seriously, I'd prefer dongles over some of the current DRM idiocies that are floating around.
Out of curiosity, were the big, open landscapes inspired by Serious Sam at all? I could definitely feel that sorta vibe if you added a few more enemies of differing types. Especially with the floating health kits and backpacks!
this is looking really great so far. I think making the side pieces float is doing a nice job in accentuating the figure and makes the silhouette more interesting. Keep it up its looking really great so far.:)
Yeah, skewed details really doesn't have anything to do with floaters. If the detail is floated or if it is modeled straight it, the skewed bake is because of the normals on your lowpoly mesh. More here: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=81154
Actually, I think Valve wants to make his model ironic comparing to his character, being all high and mighty. I hope Valve make him float at least. A flying midget sounds interesting to me.
I think the connections from the body to the arms/legs could maybe be beefed up a bit. At the moment they look almost like they're floating in space from certain angles. You could probably add some pistons.
Feels good man, I like the large shapes mixed in with some of the smaller objects that carry a good amount of noise. Nice mix for the eye to float around, and i love the last render scene shot. Good comp