Originally posted by Bobboau
9700 should be good enough,
without medelers we wouldn't have anything to make us look good with
many of the ships can probly just have some sort of smoothing effect aplyed to them, I nurbed a persius the other day to great effect
now for some extreem technicalities
currently for one subobject, you can have no more ( 
) than 15000 triangles, this can be changed
you are also limited to 3500 points
and 5500 normals (these both can be changed, especaly the last one)
currently only texture mapped polys are suported
those look like they have some sort fo procedural noise applyed to them, I'm assuming this is just a place holder
there is no limit to polygon count (but there is a limit to triangles)
just as a note: since Max won't allow me to do otherwise, all the polycounts I gave, give or will give, Always, are triangulated count. Face count if you will.
-yup, that's procedural placeholders, altho I can output them as bitmaps easily.
I'm not a great fan of just mesh-smoothing ships: they tend to make the ship thinner, it removes all the hard edges ( of course, you can use weights, but you don't have much control ), plus and mainly, should I say, this won't add new details, just remove visible angles.
Plus for me, as standard, a high detail terran ship ( meant for HT&L - we should find a term for those, it's a pain to have to write the whole explanation every time
) must have a glass cockpit, with a visible pilot inside ( like my clipping benchmark valkyrie ), and you'll find it difficult to build one ouf of a meshsmoothed mesh.
