The physics in this game only kicks in after you interact with them, its the reason why some objects seem to be perfectly placed one minute and appear to be floating when you bump into them :)
while i agree with your message, showing a standard lighting with bare-bone hdri background and floating subject as prime example of good presentation is definitely not in the sense of learning from the best : P
Oh snap! Completely forgot about the hero haha. He'll use his ears to fly, and his tail will rotate swiftly like a neat propeller blade. Floating elephant blimp ahoy!
Ah you're right, i can set and get vertex color as floats. So nevermind what i said . There shouldn't be any loss in conversion. Unless the exporting format is remapping as int.
You could use tiny polygons floating ontop of the actual geometry, and use them as decals. This way they can have much better resolution without a need to increase the res of the actual textures.
HAWK12HT.. I googled 'Andrew Loomis perspective' :) He has a whole series of old books that are out of print now but floating around the web in various forms, they're all very useful.
You may want to explode your mesh before baking and separate all the overlapping elements or use a name matching feature. The artefacts you see are rays hitting the wrong floating geometry.
Your quaded version is MUCH better. But now we can use different techniques like floating geometry, and we can remove some extra edge loops. Keep at it!! and Keep it clean!
Looks great man. As far as all the screws and such goes, if you didn't want to float nor model them in, there's this (100% time saver)... Eat 3D - 50 Free Custom Bolts Normals