Yea that is generally what I would do, I usually have three meshes low, med, high. When I used to make characters and weapons in Mudbox (which btw is freaking amazing as you essentially draw and sculpt everything its wicked for characters and creatures) Mudbox already takes care of the mesh quality using layers. It adds polycount up to about 10x the original, you start off sculpting the basic feature lines then go up a poly level work on fine muscle lines, up another level work out the details up another levelt extra. Best part is you can do all these changes in layers quite similar to photoshop so at any point you think maybe I need to go over this more, you can just untick the other layers and work on just that one layer.
Maybe you made deeper cuts than you wanted and just need to make them a little less rough, easy done just turn down the strength on the layer. The program also supports an exceptionally good texture painter and blending method it's literally like drawing in photoshop literally. (
http://www.autodesk.com/products/mudbox/overview) if you ever google Mudbox images you will certainly be curious, but yea I usually export absolutely everything into mudbox at some point when it comes to characters or plants rocks anything which is not using geometric shapes to build.
I will see how ships go in there at one point, Like I would probably make my med poly model in Max without any surface details like vents or cuts just the basic box shape I wanted to go with, export that into Mudbox and sculpt the detail work in and use the mudbox version for the normals and everything else.
I am quite familiar with engines using different levels of mesh quality (LOD) Personally the ships in this game however could use more details, what I was thinking about doing was making ships with cockpits you could SEE into. I know there are no hangar bays yet either but I could still create a fake hanger with common military ships in it scaled down so it looks like they are docked.
Possibilities are pretty endless here, I know my computer can handle high poly games the question is will the engine represent the detail good enough to be worth it. The shaders in this game are pretty basic they could use a little love but I worked around it using ReShade and ENB Wrapper.
The problem I am going to run into here is in the GRAND SCALE of things, If try and increase the detail too much everything else in the game will like poor quality and the only thing standing out will be the textures and everything else I can't change.
I would literally need to re do all the station modules textures if I go and replace all the ships with more poly count and inner details. So for the sake of the experience I was going to just change one or two of the capital ships and double work on better baked textures for the rest.
Just it's hard because we don't have the original work so I can't bake NEW normals for the rest of the ships I can only change the textures for the ships, cockpit on the other hand I can do and that is an area I will do. I was thinking about using different cockpits per ship but then that's a lot of work and I would need to edit the gauges for each ship so the displays line up where I want them, So I was thinking of just improving a global cockpit until somebody helps me out.
[Edited on 2/8/2016 by Misunderstood Wookie]
