Aside from rigging and any critiques the Blender Community has to offer, I think this guy is done.
Taking aesthetic design choices from Grant Warwick, SGTHK, and an unnamed third source, I present: THE BOT! This took about a month in total because I was extremely self punishing in trying to keep the poly count under 2 million and I… sorta succeeded!!!
Poly Count: 504,288
Subdivided: 1.95 Million or 2.5 Million
Objects: 206
Render Time: 32:07-Dual Titan Blacks @ 2800X2200-350x275 Tiles & 1500 samples (for both models at the same time)
Software Used: Blender 2.7, Photoshop
I am utterly baffled, I went through all the objects, looking for discrepancies and found none. The realtime interface tells me I have 1.95 million polygons but the render interface tells me I have 2.5 million, even with every rejected model on other layers deleted. This one has got me, every model had the exact view and render iterations yet I get different poly-counts. None the less, I will post some wire-frames after I get back from the gym, pun intended.
In other news, even though I am a 3DS Max user, the company I work for uses Blender and so this may or may not be a future project the company has in the works.
Thanx, I just finished a 56 minute, 48 second render with the same render settings and camera position (used the velvet texture instead of diffuse which hurt the numbers). I was lazy and tried to copy attributes and link materials so that I could quickly get some wire frames out and the borked effect is pure awesome! One will notice some objects are significantly more denser than others and that is because I applied the first subdivision level so that I may cut more detail into it before adding another subdivision modifier with one (and in one case(foot guard), two) iterations.
There might be a way, but I am not sure if you can do this like in 3DS Max where you can add an edit object modifier over top of a subdivision modifier so that you can edit the subdivided geometry without losing the ability to backpedal on your polycount. None the less, some dense objects such as the knee and elbow pads (the base plate of said pads have a subdivision modifier with one iteration) which needed a subdivision level in order to bend properly with the simple deform modifier are good enough that I do not need to add another subdivision level as all the detail was already cut in pre-deformation whereas the main arm gauntlet needed 3 since it is an incredibly sparse object.
All in all I used between one and two subdivision levels for most objects with a couple having none at all and others having the first level applied to give me extra detail to work worth followed by a one iteration subdivision modifier in most cases.
