Ok this might be a stupid question ( 
) but I was wondering, what is an acceptable number of polygons if I want to export my object in Maya for example??? My object is a Polymesh3d and right now it has approx. 500,000 polygons…is it too much? 
I honestly don’t know what Maya’s capabilities are in this respect, but the rule of thumb for animation packages is that less is more. The more polygons you have, the harder it will be to work with those polygons in real time while you’re setting up your animation.
This is why ZBrush provides displacement and normal mapping features – so that you can send a low polygon model to Maya (or another animation package), animate it, and then render it out to look like the higher resolution ZBrush model.
with that in mind, what would be the best way to export my model to maya?? (assuming that right now it’s a 500,000polygons polymesh)
Should I lower the numbers of polys first??
(note: Im only going to use it for an image, not an animation)
Silver: Maya can handle it. It may chug along but I have had upwards of 1 million poly’s in Maya. Dont plan on great deformer performance but it should work depending on your system resources. I would still however probably generate some bump/disp/normal maps and bring in a lower res model. It makes for a much easier time in Maya and unless you are rendering billboards you will not likely see the difference…
Good luck
There’s no problem here if you are making a render, just export and render.
500.000 is not that much… i’ve seen a good looking 2 million polygons bracelet for an animation, anyway i don’t know your specs, but the best thing for you is to actually try it out!
Thanks to everyone for the quick replies! 
I will try to just export it and load it in maya and see how it goes…
(my system is a Pentium D 3ghz with 1gb of ram and a 256mb GeForce6200)
bism: you said : “I would still however probably generate some bump/disp/normal maps and bring in a lower res model.”… any quick instructions on how to do this!
Silver: Sure, Zmapper is your friend.
Quick steps:
-Create a new empty texture (power of 2)
-go to a lower subD level
-enter Zmapper
-Hit create normal map.
-tweak settings-> repeat
Must have your UVs set up (texture->GUV tiles for example)
Pull JSnormalMapper for Maya or Mental ray and plug that into your network on the Maya side.
I am sure there are some better explainations scattered around this site on how to do this… Just do a search.
Have fun, good luck