How would you model this?

DarkOriax

Hey, beginner here, i was wondering what would be the most appropriate approach to this arm? i work in zbrush and in maya, i have a full human body and i want to do this style on one arm, ive thought of a couple ways but im not sure if im right.

One way is zremeshing the model until i get good low topology, send it to maya and there use the quad draw tool to build those areas that look like they are on top of the inner piece and the other one maybe with masks and extraction + zremesher in zbrush? 

Not so sure, so any advice or workflow you would use to make this is appreciated! Thanks!

iam717

Looks like a lot of indenting of normals, so perhaps some kind of "painting" of normals that wrap around the arms might be the best course without modeling, just using a "base", then adding the inner indents.

Rethinking this a bit more you would probably benefit from playing with angles, to show the thicknesses between the panels?  

From afar those lines might look weird further away.  (i play with zooming in and zooming out to see how things will look for distances, readability.)

Masks(2D) will probably be best with an insane resolution for subdivisions(3D). (options, interchangeable)

My best guesses for it, perhaps ways not thought of, looking forward to it.

In my recent w.i.p. i made glove details like this "height/bumping" like "sculpting" and it works for my needs.(can hardly see cause they are black so it works out.)  Might be "wrong" so do at own risk but, i painted the details baked the normals then reimported the baked normals and overlayed the texture and baked the maps with all the ao/curve+ maps.