Vigilance Longsword - Progress

In my attempts to duplicate the Vigilance Longsword from the Dragon Age game series, I've come up against quite a conundrum: Adding the gold filigree.

I want it in physical detail because a) it makes occlusion better and b) it really helps align textures. The problem I'm having is not making, but rather conforming it to the base mesh.

Base on left (purple). Filigree on right (the splines).

I created polys, gave them dimension, and smoothed them, but they were completely flat on one side. This wasn't a problem for the greatsword as it was pretty much entirely flat. The longsword is anything but. The design is more, I guess, organic with a lot of curved surfaces that make slapping flat details on a problem. I tried using conform, but that flattens the filigree and introduces weird artifacts (i.e. it stretches polygons through the model for some reason).

So, I've selected the borders I had on the open sides and created splines from them (the "create shape from selection" option). Next up, I'm going to increase spline interpolation, reshape as needed, conform the edited splines, get the outlying vertices matched up with the base mesh ('snap to surface' and 'axis constraints' toggles combined with the move tool), and use a series of modifiers to give it all dimension.

I don't think I'll cut out the filigree and fuse it to the base mesh like I did for the greatsword. That introduces too many polys. Additionally, I'll probably use the texture I made the normal map instead of generating one from a meshsmoothed highpoly version of the model. From experiments on the greatsword, this method produces better results in-game and means I don't have to comb a 20k+ poly mesh for imperfections introduced by MeshSmooth (Although, generating and AO or normal map from that will show you where the imperfections are. Just look for odd shadows or broken gradients).