Here is my lil wip. ill finish this up over the weekend. I have AO and normal shot, i just need to clean them so i wont bother posting that just yet =)






-phil-

It looks like you're trying way too hard to keep your highres model one mesh. Theres is absolutley no reason to do this, you just make more work for yourself. In reality things are build up of many peices, not just one huge chunk. The more meshes you use the easier it will be to control your cage, if you've got all this crazy geometry thrown together it gets very dificult to get a nice clean result, as you can see here with your mesh that is generally a bit sloppy and dosent really have nice clean hard shapes.