foley posted at 8:59AM Sat, 03 July 2021 - #4422450

Gotta say -- I really can't imagine why the vendor made that model so big. It's not even rigged. It's just a solid hunk of...whatever.

The fact that it's just a giant hunk of polys is why it's so big. If it were intended for articulation and deformation with a rig it would have to be optimized for that, requiring very deliberate edge flow and economical use of polys. I'll go out on a limb and say it was just pure laziness. A static model like that should number in the 50k range, if that, without any real loss of detail and the finer details handled by displacements and normal/bump maps. For an animation ready model the resolution should be much lower than that optimally. Retopology and modeling for animation is a very specific skill that takes years of practice. Generally those things are handled in a pipeline of studio artists who specialize and are very good at a particular practice. The model you purchased would be impossible to animate with a rig, let alone uv map, and very difficult as well to assign useful precise material zones or polygroups to for use in anything outside of zbrush