After getting XSI working again, at last, I imported a nice dagger model I found on Turbosquid. Unfortunately, it has an extremely high polycount. How could I reduce the amount of polies without poking holes in the thing?

Possibly time consuming: Tweak>Weld points, you select a point and drag to another one, they get welded to only one point. But its more controllable than automatic methods I think.

Heh, extremely time-consuming. This model's polies number in the thousands.

Could you reconstruct a much lower poly version and make the new model extremely similar?

I forgot exactly where it is, but look for "Filter Polygons"

Did you try "rotoscoping"? It's a feature in Blender, it should be there in XSI as well.

Rotoscope adds a background image to one of your viewports. You can use the filter or reduce polygons function, but this doesnt produce nice results if used too much. The best and fastest way would be to remodel it, i believe...

90% of the models on sites like turbosquid have over 90% more polys than battlefront can handle

For future reference, isn't there a low-poly turbosquid sub-thingy specifically for game dev'ing?

DarthD.U.C.K. wrote:90% of the models on sites like turbosquid have over 90% more polys than battlefront can handle

Aye. But you do find occasional gems there if you look hard enough.

Master_Ben wrote:For future reference, isn't there a low-poly turbosquid sub-thingy specifically for game dev'ing?

Wish there was, but IDK myself.

If you are using Modtool try the poly reduction tool, it is a bit different from poly filter tool. You can be a bit more precise as to what you want to do. It is in the Modify set of menus
as well.