It has been a little longer than I thought it would take for me to post an update. Work on my latest model has been going well. I think I have managed to push it as far as I can with a 10k Tri count (at least that was the target budget I was going for). The actual Tri count sits about 150 Tri's above the 10k limit. The goal now is to set up the uv's and then Create two LOD models, one at 6k and another at 2k. From there I am going to create a high poly model to create a normal map.
This is the other project I have been working on. After I created the renders below, I got a bit of feedback and decided that I would try to improve it. So I did some studying online and found some reference and also did a bit of reading. I went back through the layers and made adjustments to the color of the main color, brightened up what used to be straight black and dialed back the dirt a bit. Once in Maya I switched the material to something better suited to metal. Using that material I loaded the color and diffuse back into the material. I also created a specular map, reflection map, glow map, and finally a bump map for some more detail. After going between maya and photoshop for quite a while, I finally got something that I thought was a big improvement over my previous attempt.
It has been a little longer than I thought it would take for me to post an update. Work on my latest model has been going well. I think I have managed to push it as far as I can with a 10k Tri count (at least that was the target budget I was going for). The actual Tri count sits about 150 Tri's above the 10k limit. The goal now is to set up the uv's and then Create two LOD models, one at 6k and another at 2k. From there I am going to create a high poly model to create a normal map. 
This is the other project I have been working on. After I created the renders below, I got a bit of feedback and decided that I would try to improve it. So I did some studying online and found some reference and also did a bit of reading. I went back through the layers and made adjustments to the color of the main color, brightened up what used to be straight black and dialed back the dirt a bit. Once in Maya I switched the material to something better suited to metal. Using that material I loaded the color and diffuse back into the material. I also created a specular map, reflection map, glow map, and finally a bump map for some more detail. After going between maya and photoshop for quite a while, I finally got something that I thought was a big improvement over my previous attempt.
