I'm a beginner at modeling, using 3ds Max. I'm currently making a Viking house and ship (the ones in the game weren't very accurate) for a future mod I'm planning to make and they are pretty complex, especially the ship.

I made it using a spline cage and using the surface modifier. After having surfaced it and using 100 steps (maximum amount of polys), I get 663065 polygons when converting it to an editable poly. Since my computer kind of starts to lag now, I reckon this is way too much. Keep in mind that this is only half the ship, which I'm going to mirror later. When I reduce the amount of steps of the surface modifier to 30 (seemingly doesn't affect the appearance at all when compared to 100 steps), I only get 62465 polygons. In fact, the model doesn't look much worse than 30 steps until I'm below 20, though some edges are slightly more blurry at 20 compared to 30, however these 10 steps decrease the poly count by about 20000.

I've googled this and found nothing, so what's a reasonable value to aim for? This is a pretty large model, about 30 meters in length, 3 meters in height (without the sail) and 6 meters in width. There'll probably be a bunch of these next to each other in the mod.

Thanks!

Keep in mind, many of Skyrims models make use of normal maps to give the appearance of depth and fine details. You could probably lose a few polys by taking away areas of depth or fine detail.

One thing to keep in mind is The gamebryo/creation engine is pretty terrible at resource management so a less detailed model utilizing good normals wood probably the best option for size versus detail.

One other thing to remember is that the Nif format has a limit of 64K polys for a single Nitristrip(shape) so if going over that limit you will need to make some parts of the model using separate tristrips.

Yes, I'm aware of that. Bump maps I believe? I've just made the shape, no unnecessary details. Since I started learning modeling I've noticed how much maps can achieve - it looks like every single stone is individually modelled in walls for example, but looking from the side, they're flat.

Sorry, could you explain that a little further? I'm not sure what you mean by "good normals".

I see - I don't know anything about how to export to this Nif format or how to get it into the game, but I'd like to learn about that later. The models I'm making have a deadline (this is part of school) so I'm in a bit of a hurry, and just want to get the models done as soon as possible. So how does this change the way I should model this - can I divide the ship into two halves, each less than 64000 polys, and then put them together later? Maybe I could continue doing the model like normal and aim for 128000, and split it in two before exporting? How do I join them later, in Skyrim's CS, or some third-party program?

Also, I only have 65 polys for half of the ship before converting to editable poly. I assume so, but just to be certain - do I have to convert it to editable poly?

Thanks a lot, everybody!