im talking about the kind they use for pretty much everything in the army.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._strap_001.jpg
i saw someone sculpted some straps like that for a thigh weapon holster thing (i think it might have been something tomb raider related) and it looked pretty awesome.. I know the easy way is to just have an alpha and go over the whole model with the rake brush or something.. i dunno but the way i saw it done was really seamless and i highly doubt anyone could have done it with just an alpha

unwrap you base and displace your highres mesh

oh wow how did i not think of that.

here some tips from red...
http://area.autodesk.com/forum/autod...ls-or-padding/

I'd do a separate model for the strap, unwrap that, and throw on a seamless alpha. http://www.surfacemimic.com/ would probably have a good one.

I decided to give this method a try. I used Surface > Noise to apply the texture though (click the little white ball in the bottom left of the preview screen)and by using the UV option it worked fine. At least until I tried to apply it to the mesh. What gives?

That is a weird result. Is the geometry in place for the detail you wish to ad?
The UVs might need to be within the 1:1 bounds too. Zbrush has issues when UVs touch the borders. Noisemaker should be able to scale the alpha instead.

The UV's are within 1:0 space. I tried scaling them down so they don't touch the corners or each other. That only resulted in the detail not transferring at all. Strange...

What did work however was to scale the UV's up so large the texture tiled at the right density, and then import it as a displacement map and apply it. I don't know if Surface > Noise is broken or if I'm just having bad luck with it. :/