This is the high poly of a harbor buoy I've been working on for a few days now. I'll be starting the low poly soon, but I really wanted to post this up for some critiques beforehand. Right now I'm thinking of adding more bolts and possibility throwing it into a sculpting program to do some minor scratches or barnacles.

Looks pretty good. Yeah, I'd get it into a sculpting program and put some dings or similar on there. The two I googled seemed to be much the worse for wear - mostly very heavy rusting under the water line.

I was certain that there would be some weld marks on those eyelets, but no

Finished up the low poly geometry - it's currently 7,756 triangles, which is probably a little excessive. I still need to go back and do some sculpting on the high-poly like Tea Monster suggested. As for now, it's time to do some unwrapping so I bake it later.

That low poly might work for a highest level LOD? I guess it depends how close you're going to get to it, if you'll be climbing on it, that's probably ok...

I'd say nearly 8K is quite a lot excessive. Everything depends heavily on how it will be viewed in the game, but I think you can cut this in half easily.

Yeah 8K is loads! You can cut back so much here!

It looks awesome though

I finally had a chance to work on this again! To everyone who said 8k is too much, you all are very, very correct. Here's the final, unwrapped version which currently stands at around 4k.



Unfortunately, I've hit a bit of snag. I'm familiar with normals maps and baking from a higher poly mesh, but I've not had a lot of practice. Basically, the only detail I need to grab are the bolts and the indention that wraps around the base from the high poly. What's the best way to approach this? Baking the entire object? Should I try to hide all other parts of the mesh but what I want to bake? Should I just bake those details to a plane and just photoshop it?

Low poly is looking good tim. Sorry i cant help you with the normal map baking. Maybe someone with more experience knows something?

me neither, but as i had to model 2 bouyes for work just a few weeks ago i know u are missing parts...
those bouyes have some fancy stuffo n top of them to show wther they mark the north/east/west/south side of the danger area they are depicting (does that make sense at all, if not i'll try to get my old references somewhere)