Try to guess the low-res:
Okay, not that hard when you see them together, but still, I’m impressed that the low-res still looks great. The sharp borders can be made a little sharper again (add another vertex ring? set vertex weights for smoothing? maybe other ways to fix the shading?), but the mesh itself and its resolution seem to suffice as such. My curve has a resolution of 5 (but as said in a previous post, some curve segments can do with fewer vertices … this I decided to fix in the mesh itself), and the circle has resolution of 8 as in the lecture. In the end, after removing and bridging the vertices found in the flat areas and creating ngons on the bottom and in the hole, I obtained this:
Nice difference with the original high-resolution mesh of the previous post, reducing from 4704 verts to 768 verts (83% discount!):
