100 vehicles of WWII available

#1 Good find!

They also have what I think are very good prices for custom work. Down at the bottom...

If I'm reading it right... you can get up to 5 models that are 10k polys or less, for $25 each.

#2 I dont know, I doubt anyone could do anything game wise with those kinda poly's... I think this is inteded for movies

#3 Could be used in a animated 2D format. Many of the older RTS games used pre-rendered images/sprites.

#4 This kind of model / poly count, is perfect for bump map reduction. Looks like a very cheap / effective way to make a decent tank game.

#5 you could just get rid of the hatches & stuff (or just simplify them) and put them in the skin. There are a lot of small details on the tanks that could just be put in the skin.

#6 I think the point is, in most cases for REALTIME 3D meshes, it is exponentially more work to "simplify" a mesh than to create an appropriate simple mesh from the beginning.

These are very nice models but they are not appropriate for any kind of real time 3D work. And the effort to make them so would be more than using them as templates and just building simpler models over the top of them, which in that case it would be cheaper to by a Janes book on tanks and scan the line drawings and trace over that.

Now for a pre-rendered sequence or pre-rendered 2D sprites of tankes these are a no brainer.

#7 I disagree, automatic model generation is a real pita when you have to animate a lot. And in most cases these models would have simplistic animation so there wouldn't be a problem. These models would be reduced to ~ 2k polys with a reasonable size normal map and look identical in real time. Not a good solution for character models, but perfect for 'static' ones.

Check out either ATI's or Nvidia (Melody) / Orb / Lighwave etc. to see what I mean in action. Obviously it's only really useful for Geforce 3 level+ cards. But i'd be happy enough to call that a minimum spec these days.