Salome goes TGEA

A friend of mine asked me to make a low poly version of this character and after toying with this idea for some time I've decided to give it a go. I guess main reason was fact that living out of games I got habit of starting each and every model, no matter if it is going to be 1 mln poly or 100, with low poly version and only then gradually adding details and smoothing it. In case of Salome I had base mesh saved somewhere on my drive so most of the job is already done, although there are a few problems- side effects of specific design requirements, different for each purpose.

Character as it was, wasn't really designed to use standard Torque skeleton- it had no legs to speak off so first thing to do was to remove skirt (wasn't half as entertaining as it sounds) and add something that would work with more traditional setup, namely baggy belly dancer trousers. I want to keep the "oriental" feeling after all. There is one more thing that requires serious modification, namely hair. She can't really have original dreadlocks, no matter how much I like the idea as it would require adding additional bones and animations and increasing costs so at the moment I am browsing through XIX c. gravures to get the feeling and build something that would work. Probably some scarf with jewels above ear will do the trick. Arms still require optimization of edgeloops to make shoulders bend right but in overal mesh should not change too much. As it is it contains 1920 faces- way below limits and I am not planning having it heavier then 3500- 4000 polys in final version. Here's what I got at the moment: