Hm... I was wondering just what a modern card is capable of, s I tried an old foliage system I made and my Geforce 8800 GTS could handle 400,000 polygons at a constant 70fps.
Also, I found this site with royalty free models. They're expensive, and too high poly for games, though you could maybe have an artist build a low poly model based off them and use them to generate the normal maps:
http://www.the3dstudio.com/product_details.aspx?id_product=17097
Also, I found this site with royalty free models. They're expensive, and too high poly for games, though you could maybe have an artist build a low poly model based off them and use them to generate the normal maps:
http://www.the3dstudio.com/product_details.aspx?id_product=17097