The big issue was creating the wrap for it. I couldn't get my UVs to allow me to do it all in a texture easily. By easily, I mean placing a series of lines, skew them, and have them align perfectly on the mesh. The way the handle is, the UVs are slightly distorted on every polygon and no amount of unwrapping or pelting would fix that.
I had no idea how to make one using polygons. The last time I made details using splines was the Vigilance Longsword and that was...arduous to say the least. I kept stacking modifiers, collapsing, deleting all but the outlines, restacking modifiers, tweaking, and manually optimizing the resulting 8k poly lines. This time around, I decided there had to be another, better, way. This lead me on a 3 day hunt for some way to make a proper ribbon/leather strip to wrap around it.
At first, I looked for ways to make geometry/splines shrinkwrap around an object but all I found were guides for projecting in a single dimension and only if the objects boundaries didn't intersect (ball and a box instead of a coil around a pole). So, I made a spline with its points centered on the original model's texture handle wrap and moved each point close or into my handle. Then I found this forum post (http://forums.tutorialized.com/showpost.php?p=71033&postcount=3) saying how to make a decent looking wrap. Following that, I applied a loft to my helix-ish spline and now I had a handle wrap...that wasn't following the object I wrapped my spline around.
That's when I came across a nice property: Loft's Deformations rollout. This allowed me to rotate the resultant geometry around until I had a good angle, but it was too cumbersome to use on such a small scale. I was constantly placing points on the graph really close together and it didn't let me move segments of the wrap around so some were on top of others like on the texture.
So, I kept what I had done in place and went straight to the spline driving the loft. By changing all the vertices to either Bezier or Bezier Curve, I was able to both move the depth order of the segments around and change the curvature by hand. It was a bit tedious as sometimes rotating in X would instead rotate Z and each vertex had a different...twist, shall we say. This might have been alleviated by using Local mode instead of World, but I was so happy with my progress I didn't care and kept chugging along.
After that, it was a quick job with the texture, a little optimization, and off to NifSkope and the Creation Kit to put it all together.
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