Paul Hormis has a good method of setting up chains for dynamic simulation, you might be able to adapt parts of it to what you're doing? http://www.hyperent.com/Hyp-Tutorial-Cloth-003.php
Have to agree on the skirt material thing. I like the traditional King Leonidas look. I'm glad it wasn't the 300 Leonidas cause that would've just been silly. Looking good. Keep it up. =]
the only game ive seen with specs near that high is crysis.. but still not at 40k.. their tanks and helicopters reach around 30k.. but then again, how hard is it to run a game like that on a standard pc...
Also check out the Spacing Tool. http://download.autodesk.com/us/3dsmax/2012help/index.html?url=files/GUID-D82476F1-FE3F-4B51-BC73-868B0A28281-309.htm,topicNumber=d28e60752
Yea that's decent money for 6mo. So which is it 20k per year or 20k for 6mo. In general when you throw around numbers like 30k, 40k, 20k that is a yearly figure...
Reminded me of how much fun I had with Hero Quest :) Went to check out getting a copy again and they are like 300$ now... Awesome work btw inspiring for sure.
One way is to get a bitmap or a vector of the layout you need, then uv to that. The resolution is up to you, just render at that size. I.e. 10 inches at 300 dpi is 3000 pixels across.