My ultimate crate or barrel exists in a world of adventure and mysterious voodoo magic. The game would be a 3d platformer where you would fight pirates, solve puzzles infested with booby traps, and hunt for hidden treasure.
My object is a voodoo treasure chest. It's locked by the voodoo magic of dead greedy pirates.
Hmmm… Welcome aboard, and all the best of luck in this competition 
You’ll surely have fun with the voodoo chest I love the idea
Looking good so far.
As far as you polycount, your fine right now but, you should still try to optimize the scene as you could use some of those tris on other parts of the chest. As far as were you should probably cut back on the amount of polys around the nose and eye area of the scull. Also at the top base of the box.
Good Job and keep it up.
Looking good. You could definately lose a few polys on the skull - how zoomed in will it be? I doubt you need even half that amount. The other thing is it doesnt look much like a skull to me. The top half is good, but the jaw doesnt seem to come down enough, and there is a sort of “neck” - so its looking more like a shrunken head to me.
Thanks to you guys for the feedback. Here’s some more work on the skull. I got rid of that nondescript blob at the bottom and added a jaw. You’re both probably right about the polys on the skull. I think I got a little detail crazy. Time to optimize.
I deleted some edges and tried to clean up the skull a bit. I attempted to keep goofy polygons to a minimum.
Right now that skull sits at around 550 triangles, which is the majority of your poly count. Because of viewing distances and so on, you can reduce the count of that skull by a helluva lot, and still maintain the same look when viewing the crate as a whole.
Probably around 250 triangles would do the job just fine, but I think (as a current employer, and a former teacher) you could use the practice making really low poly.
So here’s your challenge:
Duplicate the skull, move the duplicate to the right.
Reduce that duplicate to 250 triangles.
Duplicate the reduced skull, move to the right.
Reduce that duplicate to 100 triangles.
Duplicate the even more reduced skull, move to the right.
Reduce that duplicate to 60 triangles.
I think you’ll find that while viewing all of them at once, from the distance of framing the whole chest, that likely the 250 will look just as nice as your 550, and the 250 won’t really look that much worse.
If you are planning on normal maps, you can cut that detail way down. Remember that the most important part of a model that has normal maps is the silhoette. Things that bup inward can be entirely handled by the normal map - i.e. the eye and nose holes.
Dargon, thanks for the suggestion. I really don’t have a lot of experience working low poly, and this should help me out a lot. Much appreciated.
like dargon sez, the skull is nicely modeled but you wont see this detail from more far away than ~5 meters.
peraps you want to give some polys to the insides of your crate? some coins and plates and golden cups?
also it would be a blast, havein some animated texture decals directly over the golden coins, with some glows and glitterpoints fading in and out…but i do not know if this is allowed in this challenge. :shrug:
yeah, you can barely tell. and with the ingame motion of the game, you aren’t most likely gonna stop and stare at a skull on a chest 
Much better! Still could go lower if you have to, so if you run out with the rest of the model…
Here’s the whole thing. Skull, knife, arms and all. It seems that I’ve pretty much used all of my tris. I’m thinking I’m going to have to come up with a texturing solution for those bones on the sides of the chest. I could probably buy myself a few more tris to work with if I get rid of the indentation on the sides and back of the chest. I’m just not sure it’s worth the effort. Feedback would be great at this point. I’m not exactly sure what I’m gonna do.
hi steen, you could save plenty of polys, by making up an alpha map for the fingers of the hands, insted of using solid geometry. you could set up a very low poly plane and bend it like the fingers are currently bend.
. i it works out well you could also think of saving some polys by using this technique also for the forearms.
you could visually improve the crate by using some polys for the inside/content of the box. so that you have a homogenous distibution of your polys all over the details.
the insets are ok. perhaps you should leave them how they are.
the skull could also be reduced a bit more. try to leave out the eyeholes and use therefore only a gradient grey to black pixels on your texture. make use of the normal map also on the skull! arrange the interplay of mesh and normal map.
perhaps use ur “highpoly”-skull as a source for the normal map, then use an EXTREMELY reduced version of the sjull for the low poly mesh.
you could try using “melody” from nvidia for making the normal map.
when u saved some polys go for the details of the content of the box.
Thanks for the suggestions Sascha. I tried to install melody but it seems that my computer is too old. I’m using a geforce 3 on a pentium3. I guess I’ll have to look into something else.
I’m going to experiment with the alpha map idea and see what kind of results I can come up with.
That alpha map idea seems to work pretty well. I think it actually even looks better than having the 3d fingers.
well done