well ... so this took a crap ton of work. Back when I started this, I wanted to do a small chest cutout as well, but yeah ... I think I'm done, this is good as is, hehe. Enough said here
in any case, polished the concept from last time and detailed it, the highpoly model for this back part is now complete. Changed some stuff, added some stuff and removed some stuff during this process. Some pieces don't fit extremely well with each other, but that's more of a design thing which I'm not great at to begin with. Chasing perfection in this regard would just take too long, for too little return.
There's a lot of pieces that I had to deal with, I think there's close to 60 parts to this and some of those have multiple parts in them. It is necessary though, in my opinion, to give it that complex techy look, otherwise it looks fake and not believable.
lowpoly work still remains to be done and of course texturing and whatnot, but it's all downhill from here. Most of the parts at this point have a base lowpoly model that just needs to be tweaked to include some highpoly detail, so things should move smoothly and swiftly.