Pretty much did in the challenge exactly what Mike did. I did additional edge loops though for holes to fix tangents.
I played around and imported it to UE4, changed material and physics and it works quite well…
Though ~10k tris for a ball seems like an overkill for me…
Managed to go down to 2k tris with ico sphere…
Can you tell which one of the 2 has 2k and which has 10k triangles?
And also it depend how you use this in your game. Close ups or far away. Even more simplification could be possible.
I still don’t know if I’ll make a “full” game out of it. This is primary learning experience for me :). But assuming I would make a small bowling game - the ball would be the main “character”, so it would be visible from quite close at certain times (around something like on the vid).
I couldn’t get much lower than that and still having smooth surface, esp. around the holes. But I was looking at the ball from quite a close distance (like on the first picture). Any pointers how to do that?
Objects for games can have different mesh solutions.
The game engine, can than switch to low - high resolutions in case of need.
Blender has a module called multi resolution. Working on an object in different resolutions.
The holes are the main resolution issue. But when a ball is rolling fast over a bowling lane, motion blur. Then do you need a high resolution ball with hole? Or is a versionwith no holes, and a normal map enough (which gives the illusion of holes).
Normal maps and multiresolution, will be part of this course.
If you have enough CPU power, then no problem. In complex games, every vertex counts.
Thanks!
Now that you wrote it it’s obvious to use LODs with lower LODs not having holes at all. I was overthinking the problem and thinking of a solution that would be using one mesh that would fit all situations :D.
An animated bitmap (GIF, Sprites) . The way we did this in the old days.
I don’t know which one was the 2k one but they were both scared to see you.
(I think it was the right one)
Ha, yeah… they run away 
It was actually the left one 
It got me fooled! Seems to do the trick perfectly! 
Actually, the fun fact is that me too… I had to fire up unreal to check, because I already managed to forget how I set them up and couldn’t tell the difference from the video
