>> ...until you walk past a light source. Ah, the wonders of per-polygon 
>> lighting calculations. :-P
> 
> I thought all games used per-pixel lighting now?

Apparently HL2 doesn't. (They've upgraded the Source engine several 
times since then, so maybe it does now. I doubt it.)

>> I don't even want to *know* how much disk space that eats, do I?
> 
> Blender told me it was taking up 372 MB

Ouch. That's a hell of a lot of space for one single model. God only 
knows what an entire scene from something like Cars takes...

> and I could still navigate around the scene in real-time 
> (maybe around 5 fps).
> 
> It seems the best nVidia cards (eg GTX 295) have a graphics bandwidth of 
> almost 20x what I have and 4x as much RAM, so I suspect you'd be able to 
> edit and work on well over 20 million triangles with no problem on a 
> high-spec machine.

I have a GTX 280. It tells me it has several hundred cores. This makes 
me very happy. (It does not, however, make Crysis run smoothly...)

>> (Nor how long it took some poor soul to manually place 7.3 million 
>> triangles by hand...)
> 
> LOL, for the 5325th time, nobody manually places the triangles by hand, 
> they are calculated automatically by the computer using a subdivision 
> algorithm. Here is an example of the base mesh that was actually drawn 
> by hand:
> 
> http://tinyurl.com/yavvpgx

That still looks impossibly complex to draw by hand.

Look at the belt. It's circular. Ever tried drawing a circle using 
pencil and paper? (Hint: It's physically impossible.) Sure, you can move 
the verticies around after you've drawn them. But it would still be 
hopelessly hard to arrange 80 points into a near-perfect curve like 
that. And that's just making the outline; next you have to somehow model 
the height of the belt, not to mention its thickness. Impossibility upon 
impossibility.

Also... no triangles. Only quadrilaterals, as far as I can tell.

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