i wish you the best of luck. it's very tough to break into the industry, but if i get the gist of this (you're making an educational game right?) then you're filling in one of the many niches that exist at the moment.
if you need any 3d assets, let me know. i'll do them for no charge, as long as the title is unreleased. we can negotiate payment if and when it comes to selling a product.
but until then, as i said, i'll make you anything you need.
edit: after reading a few of your posts with regard to your own model, and comparing it with Yuna. and in particular, your comment with regard to the ps2 capabilities. realise that the "millions of polygons" aren't just in the player models, but also in the environments etc. and that weapons tended to be fairly dense for their size.
also, try to visualise how many pixels on screen your character will be taking up. if it's less than 500,000 then you should try to keep your model to less than 5,000 triangles. the reason being, you'll never ever see that much detail anyway. the same goes for a texture. if you have a 512x512 texture, you won't see all of those pixels unless they fill up the same number of pixels on screen. which means that a face with that size map will probably need to take up 1/4 of your average monitor. not to mention, the more faces/normals your mesh uses, the more information has to be loaded into your video memory. you can expect a model of around 10,000 triangles, with a single 1024* map, to hit about 10mb. if you're looking at 50k triangles, with a 512* map for each object. you're then looking at about 1000mb (taking into account the number of textures). which means loading that model alone will bottleneck your videocard, stopping you from rendering the world around it, and any other characters you have.
A sound theory to go by is this: always have at least one viewport (i usually use a second perspective view) zoomed and locked to the same distance/model size i want my model to be in-game. any verticies which are no longer defining an outward shape on the model, are redundant and unnececary, so get rid of them. the most important thing to focus on is the silouhette, because internal details will be handled via texture.
feel free to email me, or contact me on aim/msn. i'm more than happy to advise/teach/do some work for you.
also, check out:
www.poopinmymouth.com (ben mathis) for a bunch of really useful theory and tutorials.
http://boards.polycount.net/ubbthreads.php?Cat=0 <<< that should be your new home. it's a hangout for both wanabe's and professional game artists alike, along with animators, modelers, mappers, texture artists, and a few programmers. you can find anything you're looking for there, and if you can't then ask someone. be warned though, they are kind of cliquish, and you'll need to pimp something REALLY cool to get their attention. and they don't care about your feelings when it comes to critique. they will be honest, and open. and if they tell you to restart your model, it's probably for the best.
i can also explain to you how they put up "invisible barriers" without making them look like they are there (kinda the point i think?). the water would have an under-current for example, which would push you back in. and at the edges of the map, you would have a piece of cliff/land that comes out just far enough that you can't get past it without having to swim through that nasty undercurrent. when walking along, the bushes next to you would be overly thick, you'd need a chainsaw to get through. etc.
