Medieval Scabbard Model Questions

Stealth4Health

Hi! I want to model a scabbard with its laced belt like you can see on the pictures. I am having difficulties especially with the slits in the core piece and the straps and how to thread those through. Further below you can see what I have so far. I am not sure how to proceed. I have tried a couple of things but it didn't really work well. If you have any advice I would appreciate it!

Some questions:
How could I do the slits? Model them or do them completely in ZBrush somehow?
Regarding the leather straps / belt - does it look like that working with splines is the right way to do it here? I tried to cut the basic shape (edge) on the base mesh and then choose Create Shape (I had problems with the angles there). Or extrude/shell the cut-in polys from a copy of the base mesh? Or maybe use Marvelous Designer even? I feel like that there is a better way to do it which I am not aware of... (and by the way, the low poly doesn't have to have all the slits and the small details in its mesh, but I still would need to get them done for the high poly atleast somehow.)
Thank you for reading!

SebastianBielecki

Usually when making that kind of belts and straps i use single sided polygon/quad detached from orytinal mesh as a copy. Then going into the edge subobject mode and extruding selected edge using move tool while holding shift. It require some time to complete depending on the complexity of the belt. Using also rotate and scale whete it is needed. When i'm happy with my shape i'm adding shell modifier (with straighten corners ON) to give the belt thickness. Where you can see belt is overlapping, you can alwas go back in your stack to edit poly and move polygons (with end result turned ON so you can see the thickness from shell modifier).
You can as you mention also make a copy of the base, cut where the belts should be, select them, ctrl+i to invert and delete everything else and also add shell modifier. After cutting you'll probably have to make some cleanup, cause there will be triangles and n-gons, also cut tool likes to drop additional verts here and there
You can do that using splines as well - select the edges and hit 'create shape from selection' - you'll get a spline, select it and in render/viewport options select 'rectangular' and play with the values.

I presonally don't like to play with nodes and handles for corners, so i'm using first method/second method

SebastianBielecki

I forgot!
You can also use Loft (in compound objects category). Create a shape you want the belt look like and create a path, then it is basically extusion on that path.

Stealth4Health

Thanks a lot for the answer! Didn't know of the Loft objects before. Looks promising, will take a closer look at those as soon as possible. I have now done it by manually extruding the edges, which I was afraid of first. It took some time but it looks quite good now I think