Completed Low Poly model

After completing my high poly model and giving it some wear and tear in Zbrush, i was able to export the model back into Maya so that I could begin work on my low poly model. At the stage of exporting however, I had decided that it would be far easier for me to export the model into two pieces, dividing it into by the upper half of the gun and the lower half, making the baking process later on down the line a lot easier for myself. For display purposes however, in these screen shots I have put the two halves together to show what the low poly looks like in its full form.

The process of creating this low poly model began with setting my high poly model as a live surface and quad drawing out the low poly over the top of it. I began the quad drawing on the center most mass of the model where the long rectangle barrel is situated, this was an easy starting point as it was a very simple shape to draw around. From this stage however, I found it a lot more intuitive using the extrude edge tool more than I did the quad draw tool. With the high poly still set to live surface, extruding the edges meant that they would still stick to the model underneath and so I could map out my low poly model much quicker than I could with the quad draw tool. 

Because of how detailed my high poly model was, what with the wire on top, micro-fusion cell situated within the gun(Cylinder on left side of gun) and especially the front and back of the rifle where the slight fins are situated, I found it quite difficult to create these lower detail polys around these parts. The front and back of the barrel was the part that I struggled with the most and that was because I really wasn't sure how much detail to put into my modeling here as it was the part in the high poly that I spent the most time on ensuring that it looked exactly like my reference, however in the end I trusted my judgement and I am pretty happy with how my low poly turned out, I just hope that it bakes well with the high poly model now in the next stage.

As you can see in the top left hand corner of these screen shots, my final poly count of tri's for the low poly model came to 11067, where as you can see in my previous posts that the poly count of tri's for my high poly model was 117561, and that was before I exported it into Zbrush and subdivided it, so the poly count has been substantially reduced in this model, meaning that it will be pretty well optimized when it comes to putting in engine.