I don't intend to. Though, to be honest, when the average GPU can output ~1b tri/s, I highly doubt the extra 20-30k poly will crash the game.
It is far easier to crash the game due to badly coded mod than from resource intensive mod, but I digress, bad practice is bad practice, though I am obscenely lazy in that regard...
You don't have to, but it's so far from user friendly I hope you don't up it cause it will cause other modders trouble as users that don't know why they're CTDing will blame every mod in sight.
Well, I'm not saying that normal maps are pointless, and significantly lower poly count is definitely better for performance.
However, what I'm saying is that since I make outfits for personal use, 50k or 500k polys really don't affect the performance on my end, so I usually forego baking altogether. Should I generate normal map from mudbox and bake onto a low poly mesh? Certainly. But do I have to? Not really, in my case.
That has to be the most pointless zipper I've ever seen... and yeah, 50k poly seems ridiculously high even to me, and my modelling experience could be carried in a thimble.
50k is far too much for a game mesh, 10 times too much for something covering that little surface. :[ You can get a very smooth looking surface even with way less polys, you can then bake the high resolution mesh into a normal map and maintain the high-detail look. Not even commercial character models in games that show high detail closeups (Uncharted for reference) go that high, for those it's like 20-30k for the entire character and for central characters alone, if you pair something like this with a high res texture set you can cause CTDs and huge framerate loss.
There is seriously no loss and only gain in doing a retopology and baking the detail in. Normal maps aren't 'gimmicky', they're part of industry standard good modeling practices.
It's only ~50k poly; my aim has always been to add as much detail as possible to the mesh instead of relying on *gimmicky* methods such as normal mapping or parallax.
Certainly, you can weld the verts, or optimize the topography, but the end result always appear blocky and jaggy, so for me, the extra verts help make the armor look much nicer.
Is this a high res source model or a game mesh? I'm assuming the latter since it's on top of a rigged body. You might want to do a retopology on it to cut down the polycount, as this looks very poly intensive to me and you can easily bring it down as low as 3000 triangles without losing any detail Saves performance and makes UVing and skinning much easier.
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I don't intend to. Though, to be honest, when the average GPU can output ~1b tri/s, I highly doubt the extra 20-30k poly will crash the game.
It is far easier to crash the game due to badly coded mod than from resource intensive mod, but I digress, bad practice is bad practice, though I am obscenely lazy in that regard...
However, what I'm saying is that since I make outfits for personal use, 50k or 500k polys really don't affect the performance on my end, so I usually forego baking altogether. Should I generate normal map from mudbox and bake onto a low poly mesh? Certainly. But do I have to? Not really, in my case.
Not even commercial character models in games that show high detail closeups (Uncharted for reference) go that high, for those it's like 20-30k for the entire character and for central characters alone, if you pair something like this with a high res texture set you can cause CTDs and huge framerate loss.
There is seriously no loss and only gain in doing a retopology and baking the detail in.
Normal maps aren't 'gimmicky', they're part of industry standard good modeling practices.
Certainly, you can weld the verts, or optimize the topography, but the end result always appear blocky and jaggy, so for me, the extra verts help make the armor look much nicer.