Yeah, I just saw this on another thread. The edges are WAY too tight and will not bake nice at all. Make them a lot smoother so you smoothness baked to the lowpoly edges.
You totally don't need those holes on lowpoly magazine... they can be easily done with normal map I guess. Generally, there's a ton of redundant polygons on LP, not adding anything to the silhouette...
Long time no update, here's an update on the lowpoly with the shader in action. Early stages of the diffuse and normals applied to the model here. No spec or any other maps at this point. Getting closer!:poly136:
On top of what Shrike said that scope is not going to bake well at all. You are going to get all kinds of waviness and artifacts because of how different your lowpoly and highpoly are in that area.
Ah yes, the one I wrote is basically just for mass bridge-capping on lowpoly models, miauus one is more for highpoly and stuff that's not geometry constrained. Both are useful for different purposes.
It's probably just using functions from the ProOptimizer modifier (the version of PolyCruncher that was built in starting with 2010) to create the lowpoly, that'd explain why it doesn't like older copies of max for that step.
Here's some of the lowpoly. It's not optimized yet, so it looks alittle messy at places. I still have to get rid of some of the edgeloops and what not. right now im at 15k tris.
Also concerning the roof: using 2 straight logs instead of curving them a bit more makes the whole thing appear much more lowpoly than it is. Add a couple of loops there?
polyInfo did the trick for my very lowpoly stuff (mostly tris and quads) but a more accurate and flexible solution is always welcome :) I'm sure I won't be the only one needing this