you could try to lay this one out on a flat surface add all the indentations You want, apply turbosmooth once or twice and then use bend modifier so it forms a cylinder
Create a few straight bricks use the bend modifier? Create a few bricks arrange the verts by hand? Trace the bricks out with a closed spline, convert it to edit poly and bevel or extrude?
Yes. In fact, you should collapse often in Max, for better stability. Collapsing UV modifiers does not remove the UVs. Depends on the shader, you need one that supports multiple UVs.
Blender 2.5 also has a decimate modifier. I could never get Meshlab to preserve UV coordinates, and not sure if Blender does, as I haven't used it much yet in Blender.
How customisable is it? Like Silo? I love silo but want modifiers and deformers so am looking at moving back to Blender, if it can be setup almost identical to Silo that would be shweet.
I can't really comment on the development cost, but the main thing you need is the 100$ dev kit from Apple. My friend started with the Oolong engine, and heavily modified it from there.
well son of a bitch!!! a big thumbs up really! I've been using a stoopid hack with a modified shortcut which worked about 20% of the time. This works perfect so far!!!
Are you using Skin or Physique modifier? Skin has the Paint Weights tool which allows you to weight vertices/faces, and Physique has a vertex-level selection to link to bones.
TBH i don't really know. I was trying to stick to a game asset workflow, so thought that the lower poly the better. then add the detail non-destructively using a subsurf modifier. Is this wrong?
Sure. For LP part I used sharp edges and edge split modifier. I wanted to redo this part from zero, but I would like to figure it out, because this can happen with more serious parts.