Right. Let's see if I can make some sense of this illustration. We'll start at your drawing and work anti-clockwise.
From your drawing I copied out one curve at a time. I only did four of them as an example. Those curves became individual paths for Follow Me. The results of four Follow Me operations using the same profile are shown. Note that it is important to set the profile perpendicular to the first leg of the path. After Follow Me on each of these, I extended them a wee bit with Push/Pull to make sure I'd have geometry for Intersect.
Next we have two views of the geometry after running Intersect on the four parts moved together. There's a fair amount of deleting unneeded geometry, softening and hiding edges. To make it a bit easier to keep my ducks in a row, I worked first on two extrusions intersected with each other. Then I drew the next extrusion and repeated the Intersect, erase, soften and hide operations. Then I started with the process over again. At the top of the image is the profile I used.
To do the spherical parts, I would make a sphere and then use Scale to stretch it out a bit. this would also get intersected.
In all honesty, I don't think I chose the most appropriate profile for the Follow Me operations. I also used the same profile throughout and I'm not certain it works that well.. I think it might be more appropriate to change the profile for different parts.
While drawing this, it occurred to me that the pointy bits might not work so well as drawn. I'm not really sure how they should be done even in wood. Should they come to a rounded point instead of a line? Perhaps the parts of the leg that aren't spherical should have sections that are more nearly circular. There should probably be some sort of "ankle" or another sort of transition into the spherical parts.
Drawing this is certainly a challenge although for me it's more because I don't know what it should look like. You can play with this method and see how you get on.
Earlier I mentioned drawing the leg sections and using Skin to fill in between them. That might work better especially if the section profiles change between areas.
No matter what you do, I think you'll want to ultimately split the leg in half half both across its width as well as in thickness. Make a component of the quarter of the leg and then copy and mirror it to make the rest. I think it'll still be a fairly 'heavy' component but it should be manageable then.
Another idea comes to mind. Perhaps you might consider drawing the leg without the spherical parts--just continue the curves as if the spherical parts aren't there. Soften the edges of that geometry and then make the spherical parts separately, move them into place and do an Intersect. this may not be perfect but it might get the point accros with less time and energy invested in the drawing.
I think this last thing is something that should always ride in the back of your head when modeling. How much detail do you need to draw to get the point across? Don't draw stuff if you can communicate the idea without it.
There. Are you totally confused now?
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