>> The front wing you see, probably took about 20 minutes, most of that time 
>> is just moving around vertices until they are lined up nicely in all 
>> views.
>
> Damn you're fast! o_O

Really, it's just clicking and dragging points until they line up with the 
image, it's not difficult or slow and you can get something that looks 
realistic very quickly.  If you gave me a blank page and said "draw a car" 
it would take me forever to get something that even remotely looked like a 
real car - that's what car designers are for and they typically don't use 
Blender, just marker pens and big sheets of paper from what I gather :-)

> Last time I tried to do this, it took about an hour and a half to model a 
> banana. And that was using a special "mode" where you're basically just 
> deforming a sphere.

I suspect if you imported the outline shape of a banana and used it as a 
background it would speed things up radically.

> OK. It's definitely Wings that I tried out then, cos it didn't look 
> anything like this. I'll have to give Blender a go at some point...

I used Wings for a bit but I didn't get along with it - it was awkward to 
modify meshes and it sometimes got confused about how the mesh was connected 
and I couldn't find a way to fix it.  I think more people use Blender, there 
were certainly more tutorials out there to help learn, and it seems to have 
more useful "speedup" features to help with mesh design.  It's by no means 
easy to learn though.  You will have a massive shock with the UI if you are 
used to using other Windows software - it seems to reinvent all the standard 
dialog boxes and well-known methods for tool-panels etc itself, it can be 
very frustrating at times.

> Interesting. HL2 is "only" a computer game, and so presumably has the 
> lowest possibly polygon counts, and yet it fills a 4GB DVD.

Textures.  My car models typically have no textures, maybe one for the 
license plate but that's about it.  I suspect in a game there are many 
thousands of textures.  Even back in the day of Duke Nukem 3D I remember 
scrolling through pages and pages of texture thumbnails in the level editor.

> Even more interesting: Apparently npc_alyx has 8,232 polygons. That's a 
> tiny, tiny number for such an absurdly complex object!

Skilled modeller.

> [Actually, the first "smooth" is about 20 seconds. It's the second, third, 
> fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eight smooth operations that take the 
> time! Not to mention tweaking the mesh inbetween...]

In Blender even on smooth depth 6 with 350K vertices on *just* that front 
wing (each triangle seems to be about 2mm wide!) I can still rotate around 
smoothly and drag points on the initial mesh about while the smoothed mesh 
follows in real time.

Unless you are planning to print the model 60 foot high for a HUGE poster, I 
see no need to use smooth depth 6 though, smooth dept 3 makes the outline 
curves perfectly smooth when rendered full-screen.

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