Thanks for the comments and the links Jason! I am using r3 and I know about and have used magnet spheres in the past - but when I created my magnets for the wings on this one I am not quite achieving what I am looking for. So I got to thinking about different methods of creating them… I might go ahead and use the magnets and then retopo. Thinking about playing around with a few other ideas - might just through a plane on there and extract some polys with a bit of thickness…
Another thing that comes to mind is that when I was using magnet on this model - I was actually building the wings into the body - all as one tool. Classic skinning was screwing up a lot of the parts of the body - so I turned it off and deleted my magnets. Now that I have split the wings into their own tools I might give it another go.
Thanks again though man - any info is better than none!