> Don’t forget to use low or “smart” poly features otherwise you get too many vertices to the point you can’t performantly raycast etc.

I've found it's actually best to do maximal quality generation and decimate/meshopt to desired budget.

If you're raycasting against your raw art you're doing it wrong anyway, none of the big players do this precisely for the reason you mentioned. And beyond physics meshes, if you're doing anything where performance is a problem you probably want multiple LODs so you have to do this work anyway.

These days you can just ask your agent to build you a LOD pipeline and forget about it rather than sacrificing the art; Claude knows Blender.

Never had success decimating in Blender. It’s WAY too many vertices. Unusably huge.

Decimating ends up ruining the look of the model to get it down to a game ready size.

Even a simple house model, or humanoid, using Decimate in Blender there is no way that will be even recognizable.