How to approach modeling a character with an armor?
Hey Guys,
I’m currently working on clone trooper from Star Wars. Normally I model spaceships or other hard surface stuff, but rarely a character. The last character I did was about 4 years ago.
I’m making the whole character as a production ready mesh, that means SubD workflow with triple edging and all quads. I’m also modeling it from a camera angel, so that I match the original reference as close as possible. As you can see in the images, I’ve now completed the armor, so basically all the hard surfaces stuff, and I’m not sure how to proceed.
My original plan was to find a male base mesh online, since I’m not a good character artist, and adjust it to the armor with the sculpting tools. So, I got a base mesh, rigged it using mixamo and placed it in about the same pose. As expected, I had to adjust the mesh a whole lot, since it looked through the armor nearly everywhere. This did not go as planned, since it later looked okay from outside, but when hiding the armor, the underlying mesh looked totally not human. I think with a bit more work I can make it look nice, but I was wondering, if that is even the best way of doing this.
If I make it so that the base mesh fits rather snug into the armor (Like it would in real life), I’d imagine when animating it, I would get some places, where the underlaying mesh goes through the armor in specific poses. Then I can’t just fix it by sculpting it away.
Even though the Battlefront II mesh, which I used as reference, has a whole body underneath the armor, I was wondering if it would be a better idea to delete the mesh you can’t see with the armor on, so that it can’t clip through it? But I imagine that would make the rigging very difficult.
Like I said, I haven’t done this before, so I’m not sure what the best approach is.
Do you guys have any idea or suggestions?
I know that normally you would make the body first, before making the armor, but in this case, I wanted the armor to be as close as possible to the original image, so the body has to fit into the armor, not the other way around.
Replies
if it works in your pose I wouldn't worry about it. There is techniques to fix specific poses and that can be done on a case by case basis. But if you are making body not poke through armor when the body would always just be not rendered in game, you are solving a problem that is not a problem.
Keep in mind too, base meshes are usually a thick muscle dude. If you look at the side profile of your armor and imagine what sort of human could actually wear that, it would be a skinny little dude.
If you had a character with removable armor, where the player could customize in-game which pieces to add/remove, then you would start with a naked character, get that proportioned right, then add armor bits on top.
But you don't have to deal with that here, the armor never comes off! Just make the connection pieces between armor bits, which would be rubberized cloth or somesuch. We never see the skin of a stormtrooper. Unless you pop off the helmet, like Finn does.
Rigging will be a bit difficult regardless, as you have a lot of rigid pieces very close to each other.