Bassrath-Kata Longbow Progress

Considering how I've only remade melee weapons from Dragon Age 2, I figured I'd give ranged a shot (no pun intended at time of writing. Now, though, I intend it.) So, I started with what looked to be the easiest bow to make: Bassrath-Kata/Cynoeswr Sain.

I got the basic geometry down and was at about 950 polys. "Not bad," I thought. "I have some room for more detail." Then I looked at the normal map of the original weapon. 3 hours later and I was up to 12.5k polys. Yeah...I'd better trim that down. Curse you MeshSmooth!

So, now I'm going through and removing unnecessary edges and trying to fix all the smoothing errors (some are quite stubborn). Once I finish that, I have to make the bowstring, the texture, and rig the mesh to Skyrim's bow skeleton.