Three - Medieval Iron Armor

Jonnyboy0121

Hi guys,

I made this suit of armor for an indie game, still in development, called "Three".

You can check out some background information on the game here: http://www.indiedb.com/games/three

Comments and critiques welcome, let me know what you think!

Mr Significant

For me looks good. I like the armour. For me the shield can be more shiny on the edges, maybe some fresnel added to shader. But it's just "fresnel fetish"

It's good.

Shrike

The armor is looking nice, + pretty fine presentation, the skin tone just looks very off, and im not so sure about the head anatomy either

maximumsproductions

This is one of my favorite pieces! Not enough generic male armor is made imo! Just curious how strong your anatomy is? I've always wanted to model armor but turned off by the character nature that goes into it.

You're presentation is great as well.

Only thing that is off for me is the faces texture, not sure if that was a focus for you on this project or if it was just his equipment

Jonnyboy0121

Thank you all!

I'll look at the shader, maybe I can fake a bit of that reflection along the edges of his shield.

Yeah, I'm not happy with the head either.. it's a combination of the shader smoothing the details of the skin and just not being very strong with anatomy. I plan on working on face anatomy some more.. a lot more actually, have a lot to learn. But here's a closer shot of the face if you're curious. Top one is in Zbrush and the lower one is the lowpoly in Max with the Xoliul shader.




I'm not sure what the deal is.. I feel it's in part the anatomy itself (i.e. even I can tell the side view doesn't look right.. not quite sure why yet) but I also that the details didn't transfer from the bakes in a pleasing way.

I used TopoGun for baking for both the armor and body underneath. I noticed a lot of waviness in my normal maps, more so in the armor, so I ran the armor through xNormal and that seemed to clear it up. Maybe I'll run the body through it too and see what that looks like.

This is one of my favorite pieces! Not enough generic male armor is made imo

Haha, thanks.. I really enjoy looking at intricately detailed fantasy armor but intentionally tried to stay truer to something more realistic with this because of it's purpose. It's supposed to be a pretty low level suit of armor in the game and thought it should stay relatively simple in design.

Modeling armor is a lot of fun.. quickly becoming one of my favorite things to do. I find organic stuff like anatomy and clothing to be a lot less forgiving than making hard surface models.

Deathstick

That armor is sick! Although like others have said the skin tone needs some work. Did you ever consider messing around with mudbox's projection painting with head photo refs for a basis? It's pretty sweet for getting a base skin tone in what feels like two seconds.

DWalker

I think you're combining too many styles of armor there. The chain & plate combination is fine for the transitional period around the 14th-century, but the studded leather bracers and leggings just don't fit. The mail coat was typically longer, reaching almost to the knee, with the splits on the side rather than the front as you have it. The unprotected neck is another problem; he would have worn a chain mail hood under the helmet that draped over the shoulders. The helmet is atypical, and too thick (the actual armor was fairly thin; 1-3mm).

He's missing his scabbard and the accompanying baldric to hold it. The shoulder pieces are also missing anything to hold them to the armor.

Both handles for the shield were leather (steel would tend to cut into the hand and would provide no 'give' to help absorb blows). Also, the polycount for the shield seems very high for what it is. Most of the minor details which are inflating the cost - the rivets and the beveling of the rim - can easily be handled by the normal map. The texture map is also very large; unless you plan on zooming in to the shield, a 512 or 1024 map should be more than enough.

Bek

Show us some complete wireframes of the shield? 2k textures are definitely too high (unless you just authored at that so the client can downsize as they see fit?) and also the polycount seems much too high. From that partial wireframe it looks like you've got a lot of waste, and what's up with the UV's for it?

Depending on the circumstances you might be able to stack the two wooden surfaces (front and back), saving a lot of space. Also I'm curious what's going on with all the small stuff in the top left corner, are those the rivets around the shield edge? If so why aren't they stacked? The sword could probably be optimised further too.

Quite like the end result though, I'm going to have to try my hand at some armour sometime.

Jonnyboy0121

Deathstick: Thanks, I've messed around with projection in mudbox before. I went through Magdelina Dalena's Napolean tutorial and she used a similar approach just using zbrush instead. Looked great, really quick.. just didn't have a 3dsk subscription so couldn't try it out myself. I'll google a faces somewhere though and try it out. Maybe I'll find it useful for my own stuff.

DWalker: You seem very knowledgeable about historically accurate armor. Thank you for pointing some of those details out. I admit I wasn't adhering too closely to a high level of realism or accuracy. The lack of some of the accuracies was just my ignorance on the real thing, but I also waived other concerns because we had plans for interchange-able armor system. For example, wasn't sure what kind of trouble I'd be getting myself intp making a coif of some kind that protecting his neck area - like whether it'd go over or under the armor, how'd it fit together with different armor/clothing types, etc. So I just left it out for this suit. I do like that look though and will think about how to make it work with a new suit

Bek: Yes, I made the textures 2k so they could be downsized. I kept the rivets in there because I felt like I went a little too lowpoly with the armor (~8k for the entire suit including face) I think I was worried about leaving too many details to the normal map and it negatively affect the silhouette. But then again, the shield is mostly flat so I think my concerns were a little unnecessary.

Here's a wireframe for the shield as it is in the renders above. But then I took your suggestions and knocked out the rivets, and some beveling that really wasn't necessary in the one below.



Pretty amazing that just removing a few edge loops and those rivets and it's essentially half as heavy. The normal map does take those rivets into account, I just have to adjust the AO map.

Thanks for the tips on the shield UVs as well. I'm honestly not sure why I didn't think of stacking them.. I did a similar approach for the armor (mirror the arms and legs so they were stacked) not sure why I didn't think to do it again. I could get quite a bit more space that way, I'll re-do the unwrap for some more optimized.

Thanks again everyone for the tips. I'll be reworking the face and shield, and update the thread when I've got some good progress for you to see!

Bek

Definitely an improvement, although you can still make some small adjustments: What's the purpose of the edges that split the wooden back/front of the shield in half? It doesn't appear to be mirrored along that axis so what do those extra verts achieve? Simple to remove as well.

Same goes for the straps but they might be mirrored?

If you end up not stacking the front/back of the shield you might also consider actually attaching the front sphere part - you can read some reasoning why you'd do that here

Jonnyboy0121

Hey guys,

Went back and re-textured the knight's face. Tried to dirty it up a little, and worked on the shader some more. Here's the final result:



I have a variation/swappable second suit of this armor that I'm probably going to add into my portfolio page but as far as tweaking this suit I'm calling it done. I feel like I hit a point where the time I spend on it goes up exponentially and there isn't much progress to show for it. Time to start putting energy towards something new

Thanks again for all the feedback everyone! It's been very helpful.

maximumsproductions

Was awesome! A lot of progress on that face. Still work to perfect it though. Can't wait for your next project if it's similar themed :P! Whatever the project may be, I hope you post some earlier work in progress!

Jonnyboy0121

Thanks Maximumsproductions!

Yeah definitely.. my past couple of projects were started pre-polycount registration. This guy in particular was pretty much done when I started showing some of my work on him, just did some tweaks here and there based on everyone's feedback. But next one definitely I'll upload some more WIP shots, it'll be cool to get some tips along the way.