@bwista, What you have is good enough to do the job, pretty much. You don't need to cut a hole in the door mesh, just take the curved part and place it slightly above the door and the normal map will pick it up as if it were inset. No need to actually model it into the main part of the door. :)
You have very high density, is that your lowpoly? or do you use turbosmooth? I keep my meshes as lowpoly as possible when doing highpoly so its easier and faster to change and not as much to mess upp. If its not your base mesh plz post it easier to see the edgeflow then.
Yeah just use the connect tool and either slide it down to where you want it or have the verts move along the edges and push them to where you want them. I use the connect tool like a mad man for all my high poly work. Discover it's magical wonders.
You don't have to merge meshes to edit their UVs together. Select all components and add a UV Unwrap modifier and you'll see it in the stack with italics, this signifies it's an instanced modifier i.e. it's used in more than one location. This will allow you to edit UVs on multiple meshes without merging them
Tessellation can be helpful, but it's more recommended not to abuse of polygons. Here's an example of how to avoid propagation of unneeded details: You can see more examples here: http://blog.whiteblaizer.com/2009/03/subdivision-tips-hard-surface-modelling-iv/ It's in spanish, but you can use google translator anyways.
s620ex1 i think its actually a very easy apoach you got there. I had seen this approach before but never really tried it. So thanks for making me test it out. My test to this approach only took a min or two . I can post a tut if you like.
Dliskovecjr, One way is to start with a hemisphere and move alternating border verts in Z. Then you can edit the mesh as needed for the details. The fluted pieces can be started by extracting a spline from some of the edges of the mesh. My example is pretty simple, so you may need 'moar geo' for yours.
@"Joao Sapiro" In your design you have 2 edge loops at the top most part of the inset vs a single center point one (like mine). In your experience does having 2 give better smoothing results then 1. Or does it not really matter and that's just how you modeled it?
I can take a look later but first I would suggest you model it like a rectangular box first and then use a bend deformer to get the curvature like Pedro suggested. Try that out and show us what you end up with. It should make your life much easier :)
I'm trying to figure out how you would model thick hair braids like this. Suppose you were trying to make the character model decently low poly, around 1000ish polys. I can think of a couple ways to do it but they don't look correct from multiple angles.