I usually take the highpoly and remove loops. You're right about having to add loops for round stuff, but I don't see it as that big of a deal. The pics you posted seem too dense to me, unless this was somehow a huge object.
Oh one thing, I almost forgot it. Yes, you probably don't need to bake from highpoly with the most of the assets (there is no shadows of/on the details on your reference image.There are at a very few places, but they look more like painted "outline" in the texture).
Polycount is way to high man for such an object, and to be honest I dont know where those 20k are. The rotors look kinda booring right now, texture wise. Next time do a full highpoly of the object to get round clean edges.
A bit of what the highpolies look like for this project. The nice thing about this spec is how quick and simple the HPs can be. When it all gets crunched down to a 256 or 128 a quick chamfer job looks the same as an actual subdivision model.
Awesome, will have to give this a bash at some point. Although I use Blender for modeling and UVs, I've not tried baking yet. Have you found issues with bringing in highpoly zbrush meshes? (a few hundred thousand triangles after decimation).
Many thanks for the crits i will go back a few steps later on and make the highpoly scult much better Btw texture wise on the body did i succeded any good there as this is my first time ever to uvw a body and a head
SO i've finally finished the lowpoly. I'm going to do a second optimization pass on this guy. I'll make the changes to the highpoly that everyone suggested right before i bake. Right now i think it's at something like 6000 tris.
If your animating I belive you would keep it at high poly - but this is coming nowhere from my experience so just wait till someone varifies this :P - at least to my knowledge all the animation is kept at highpoly for smooth animation.
Thx! Well that's the trick. Like I mentioned it above, what you see here IS the highpoly straight from Zbrush :) I guess you can call it real time, because it's rendered in Marmoset, but I didn't build a lowpoly for this one.
This is the highpoly sculpt right? When you make the lowpoly, there will be some crevices between the major forms... you can put the uv seams in the hollows, along natural seams. That way when the texture LODs (mips) in the distance, the seams will be less noticeable.