Jay Smitt

Mostly just good planning before hand and deciding what is important and what is not, what the distance of the object being seen at is the biggest deciding factor. Most maps can be down sized later on as you discover what kind of res your object needs (although I’ve been told its better to bake your normals at the res its going to be used at, so make sure you can re-bake easily!), but for Tri count its the minimal amount that can hold its shape at any distance, then deciding on details like edge bevels, Bolts etc… again depends on how close the player will get.

Also keeping a consistent Texel Res whilst UV’ing. I personally use the Night shade plugin for Maya which has some nice Tools to help with this.

It doesn’t always go to plan even if you spent ages deciding exactly what will go on what map, sometimes you will have things left over that don’t fit into your UV space, so its always good to decide early on certain objects or parts that you are OK with scaling. Parts that don’t tend to need your full 512 per meter (or whatever you have decided) resolution.