I would try to make them follow the wing structure of a bird then, with joints. Right now, even if he had feathers, he wouldn’t be able to fly. If you’re intention is the make it look like something, then it should look like something in relation to what everyone would expect it to look like, not what you think it would look like. In your mind, you might see it as perfectly reasonable for his wing structure to be as it is now, and you could easily justify it. But you should never have to justify why you did something to a model in terms of anatomy or skelatal structure. It should just make sense to everyone, especially the viewer.
In terms of your question about mesh extraction for the armor, I say give it a shot! You could probably get some great effects out of it and I’m curious to see the results! I guess it would all depend on how well you have your base mesh constructed on your base model for masking and extraction. That in the end will determine how defined your armor shapes will be, but you can always add more and take away what you don’t need. In the end, it might just be as well to model it all seperately from a time perspective, but if you get the handle on this experiment, you could probably whip something of this similar design out in no time!
