Soulburns Object painter would work a lot better than advanced painter. I don't mean to bash on a script that is above what I can put together but Neil did such an amazing job I can't go back to advance painter. His spline painter script put advance painter to shame.
I wrote a similar script to the SlideKnit one, for Maya. It's pretty handy for stuff like this. Personally I think doing it by hand is quite a waste of time if you have scripts like this - you can simply model a basic shape, use Array to get everything aligned and duplicated nicely, then wrap it down to the final shape.…
EricChadwick: Working on it... :) The original thread when I released that script is here: http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?p=852366&posted=1
Great thread, added it to the wiki http://wiki.polycount.net/Digital_Sculpting MoP, are you gonna make a scripts page on your site? And maybe release this melscript? Would be handy!
very, very carefully and tediously :P i doubt a displacement map, but easily could be why don't you just ask her yourself? you're high up enough on the awesome chain that i would think she would be kind enough to divulge a slight hint or two if i was going to do it, i would use a plugin to insert instanced/duplicated…
If I did it one by one like she did and was in Maya not using 3rd party scripts/plugs, I would use a fairly evenly distributed medium-high res mesh and use Live as a starting point for each scale. Snap to the verts and edges once I modified the pivot of the original scale to the best location to yeild the best end result,…