Hey guys. I'm starting to make a game-ready version of a Beetle model that I did a while ago that was originally intended as a cinematic prop. I haven't done much of this before and I was hoping for some pointers on workflow.

At the moment the model consists of about 30 separate subdiv objects. I'm thinking I'll delete support loops, optimise, then weld these pieces together to form a main 'chassis' object around which the remaining elements can float.

Then I'll re-do the low poly UV's and bake normals, AO, diffuse and specular to the low poly (to avoid manual repositioning of texture parts in photoshop. downside to this is I'll lose the ability to edit my file in Photoshop)

Something that's confusing me: I'll be baking the high poly geometry to the low poly, but the high poly also has detail normal maps applied to it; how can I preserve this detail in the new normal map?



So does this sound like the right way to do things? What would be the approximate tri count for a prop like this?

Here's the original model: