Retopology and UV's

I made the choice earlier on that I wanted a fairly high res meshes for the low poly surfaces in order to capture all the organic forms and silhouettes, especially in the vine wall pieces. Below is the progress I've made this week. I feel I've been working very hard but I clearly didn't even come close to finishing with all the the sculpt like I had wanted to by now. I feel like I'm taking way too long to do this part of the project and I may have to rethink my process once I'm finished. I feel like I'm getting pretty quick with UV's but my retopoing is slow as hell. I picked up a trial of 3D-Coat a few days ago and that seems to have sped things up a tad; I think I might purchase the student version when my 30 days are up.

I'm giving myself another few days to finish this section of the project and I hope I can start texturing by Friday at the latest. That means that I won't get done by the end of the month but I still want to see things through to the end. I imagine I will get caught up with the texturing process as well so it may be a while yet before I can show a finished product. We'll see...

This is just a couple quick renders I did in Maya with the wireframes below each. I'm thinking that while I really will catch all the detail I would need once I apply the normals/textures, I went overboard with my polycount. Right now I'm sitting at about 75k tris for everything here. That should be a little over half of the entire thing. That's probably what took me so long. No sense in dealing with it now though, I would rather push through since the hard part is done. The top shells shouldn't take too long anyway. Though some of them still need some attention in ZBrush....