Best Practice for High Poly Model to interactive Flash

Question

Our 3D designer has made some Maya models which look great because of their high poly count. I'd like to create interactive versions of these models bound for our website leveraging Flash/Actionscript. I'm not having problems accomplishing this basic task using small models.

However the complex models we've created are just too large for the web. The process I originally pursued involved exporting the model to Collada and leveraging Papervision3D (or its ilk) to tie in with Flash. The size of the Collada object is the limiting factor here.

Outside of creating multiple versions of each model - one for high resolution renderings and movies and another for flash interaction - does anyone have any best practices for leveraging these high-poly models in a dynamic interactive interface? I'm open to ANY workflow and would like to avoid duplicating effort by creating multiple models.

This is my first attempt at diving into this, so I'm not trying to fake any expertise here. I am, sorry to say, a noob.

Answer 1

Swift3D by Electric Rain has a number of utilities that let you enhance or reduce polygon counts and thereby transform complex models into simplified Flash that are capable of running on the web. Papervision3D is one of many products that Electric Rain has.

Have you looked at the Swift3D plugins? http://www.erain.com/Products/Plug-ins/