Now comes the polygon reduction part. In the following images are basic descriptions of the most common polygon reduction methods, and some areas where they can be applied.
1. Select Edge Ring and Collapse
2. Select Edge Loop and Delete Edge
The borders of the low-res model are very important. They have to match the high-res geometry very closely so that baking the textures will not result in “blank spots” on the normal maps because of improper overlap. The white wireframe object in the next image is the high-res model without smooth. The green wireframe object is the low-res. As you can see, the two shapes might not be identical, but the borders are very close to each other.
Moving on to the wheel wells, the quickest way to make them is to select the border of the wheel well and to extrude it in.
After filling in the wheel wells, the rest of the underside can be constructed using as few polygons as possible.
Speeding up things a little, here are some of the other parts reduced to low-res.
The final low-res model will look like this. Note that each different colour represents a different material that will ultimately have a different texture. The final poly count is 7,116 – just a bit over the initial estimate!
