http://www.rsart.co.uk/2006/11/20/how-many-polygons-in-a-piece-of-string/ 30k tris seems to be the high end average for 3rd person video game characters.
Is there a reason that you have set your texture and polygon limit so low? Is this for a mobile game? I like the idea and I'd love to see you carry on further with it :)
I've seen 21 million polygons running at 40fps in Max 2011 on a dual core with 2Gb of RAM and a 9800GT, all depends on how well broken down the scene is.
-also could be used to redistribute polygon density to areas of the face that need more detail vs the back/top of the head... so 3 things... the list may grow.
Hi, Im using the same tutorial, and I got the same problem. Wasnt the whole deal with the mesh polygon number (4096 * 4096) because of requirements from UDK?
The Marmoset Toolbag is a easy to use model viewer. You will need to make your alpha plane polygons back to back in order to get proper lighting on them in Marmoset.
You can scale down those polygons on the uvmap so they don't take that much space. You won't see them anyways, so its not a problem if they are lowres.