Pauldron and Gardbrace Progress

I've started work on the main body of armor. It consists of the torso and multiple pieces that attach to the body in panels. Fortunately, the pieces are all separated into elements that I can blow apart and work on one at a time.

The pauldrons (above, purple) are currently only the geometry I derived from the original's texture. The splines you see around them represent the outline of the original model and are adjusted to fit what I have.

On the gardbrace, the spikes are extruded out and a part of their backing. The original has each one as a separate set of 4 polygons rotated and placed intersecting the backing. I might adopt the original's method as my method creates a lot of supporting polygons. Now that the spikes have been extruded, I could separate them into their own elements, fill in the gaps, and delete the supporting geometry. This would save about 100 polygons and only become an issue if I wanted to change the underlying geometry.

I have not unwrapped any piece of armor because I think I'm going to have to cut down on the number of polygons. The finished armor will probably be 40k-50k polygons, but a full set of Daedric armor is about 10k polygons. For weapons, I like to keep under 10k, but I don't have an ideal target for armor.

Given how much work this is for the light female body, I think I'm going to only make modifications to fit the light male body instead of starting from scratch (Except for the main body). Doing that will also allow me to share textures between the sexes, cutting down on space usage. I'm thinking about 1024x1024 textures for the gauntlets, helmet, and greaves and 2048x2048 for the main body.