Hey all! See below for my first attempt at a pawn.
I wanted to see if I could do the whole thing without Michael directing me, so rather than making two separate mesh objects and then joining them, I added the UV sphere directly to the pawn mesh, and then deleted the vertices making up the bottom of the sphere, inset the circular face at the top of the pawn’s neck, deleted the inset face, then brought the sphere down and merged doubles - this means that the whole inside of the pawn is one “space”, with no intersecting geometry.
Your pawn is very nice and detailed. Out of curiosity what is your tris count on that? I can not get mine to look that nice with the count to be around 100 for a low poly.
Don’t worry. This isn’t the low-poly pawn. This is the higher-poly pawn before we cut the tri count. This is about 4,500 tris - my low-poly pawn is much less rounded. This is my low-poly one:
Thanks! Reducing the tri count is super difficult, but it’s great for really distilling what the important features are for making your object recognisable.
This is my low-poly one:
