Help With Sculpting Jewelry in ZBrush

WipEout

I'm wondering if anyone has experience sculpting large amounts of necklaces and jewelry (Think Mr T amounts) in ZB? I'm working on a character right now that has a similar amount of jewelry as Mr T, but I'm just hitting a wall-- should I create a million links along splines in Maya then project those for a normal map, or just make a torus in ZBrush and get to sculpting the individual strands out of the major shape?

Any advice or tutorials or just examples anyone could point me to would be great. I'm starting to get burned out on this guy, I need to finish this hi-poly sculpt soon so I can move on to my next character.

Thanks in advance.

arrangemonk

how about a tilable heightmap and then torus+displacement
btw, photoshop really could implement a repeating canvas for texturing (as checkbox or sonmething)

woogity

might have an easy fix for you:


[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYmFeYO2aK0&feature=related[/ame]

this plugin is called extended duplicate, you can find it on the webs with a little poking around.
but yea id do it in maya unless its for like a comp that says to use Z

-Woog

WipEout

Thanks guys. Those were both options similar to what I was thinking. I may go Woog's way though-- I think I'll get better resluts without trying to paint heightmaps. I was thinking of making a PSD for a necklace-chain style brush, though. I'm pretty sure Maya has a duplicate option similar to Woogity's suggestion now-- something like Duplicate along Curve or something, I'll look into it.

Thanks again, guys!