Low Poly (ish?) need help coming up with Cloth

Seiyaru

http://imgur.com/a/pYpRO

So I am working on this sword. Referenced here you can see the poly count and stuff. The second image where you see the handle, is where I want to get a cloth like texture made, or model in, some method of cloth but I am trying to keep it fairly low poly. I found another method online using Torus's but that ended up driving up to 1.8 million poly's roughly. So I avoided that method. 

My question is what method would be best to achieve a high poly look while maintaining a low poly appearance? I have Quixel, and Mudbox (though I am inexperienced using both) and so those are routes I could go. Just looking for some general tips / advice. Thanks in advance!

Mark Dygert

Why can't you create the high poly version then bake it down to a lower poly version?

Seiyaru

Not sure what you mean bake it down to Low Poly? Idk a lot of the deeper stuff in Maya yet but always open to checking something new out if you got some advice on that.

Mark Dygert

That's probably something you want to look into, it's a very common technique, especially in game development.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYWj3zGXSjM

Seiyaru

So what it's doing is keeping the low poly count of the simple box and putting a pseudo 'covering' on the low poly one that appears like the high poly? 

So if I do this right I need to have 2 identical swords, 1 very base roughed out and the other as I have it. I then do what he did and in theory that should be it?

Seiyaru

So I did what the video did, but it still didn't really help with my issue. The cloth stuff at the back that is increasing the count incredibly high, it didn't transfer over. I don't know if maybe my wrap (the red box in his tutorial) wasn't big enough or what. But the Torus's that are representing the eventual 'cloth' texture didn't transfer over to the other sword copy.