Just playing around with a displacement map. They actually require millions of polygons to work but I just a threw a low poly model (992 polygons) to see what it could look like. I see this technique coming in handy later. You can see the advantage of the displacement map in this picture in which the shadows match the…
polygon counts are not useless, my old company they were used instead of tri-counts because the way the engine worked, the draw and memory cost was dependant on quads and tri's (to group both these shapes as polygons) a model totally made of quads (say a tube or plane) would be cheaper than the same model manually…
You can cut extra polygons here and there. Just look for unnecessary edges which cut planar polygons into extra triangles. It is handy to have them during modeling, but after you're finished with the overall shape and details, you must clean up(optimize) your mesh. Also, you've made some really small creases with geometry.…