Hi.
I went a little over board on the model I promised.
I ended up doing nearly exact replicas of greek and roman ruins in real world scale! Though they are not finished I can tell you that they will be near photo real right out of the box, so to speak.
Here is the "Temple Of Aphaia and Her Splendid Companion Athena". Its got a bit of work left to do on it:
[attach=1]
The hardest part was the column flutes. But they are all proper quads now and an exact match of the real temple.
The part thats most relevant to this thread is the polly count of the so called low polly version. As shown above it is nearly 1,000,000 unfinished/
I expect that the final sculpt and paint will be 20-30 million "p" and 1-3GB per object in TG2 (likely more).
So, not really practical for a lot of users here, I think.
Anyway, the point is that this wont be a perfect example model going by the OP post. But I would direct you to Oshyan's post on the last page in that regard. Also see my mushrooms in image sharing for good proof of what Oshyan said.
Then what I'll do is break off a chunk (one of the corners) and share that... Will look great in a TG2 prairie or garden scene.
Im modeling each of the temples and structures Im making according to the ruins. Once I have the ruins, I copy the file and continue for the un ruined version. Im making an entire city... One at a time. Then to mudbox for the ruins. For the un ruined version, I think image textures will suffice.
Ill tell you that making a column with a corinthian capital is tedious!
If anyone knows of a tut for said capital for any modeling app, I would be glad to see it, I need to speed up my process, and anything would help.
P.S.
Ulco, Im working on your heard right now