Power Armour for TESIV:Oblivion!

tda

Sup guys, my first post here!

I've always meant to make an account and post my wips here but i've always been kind of intimidated by 3d oriented forums. Browsing through at the talent in here is making me sweat bullets, haha.

Anyways, here's an armour i'm starting for TESIV:Oblivion. Although it's totally futuristic and unfitting to the world i'm pinning the design to a futuristic race within the game's own lore, so by a loophole it works

Couple of notes. The hands i'm using are the default hands used in the game, i just ripped them from the existing character files as it saves me a lot of time and effort rigging those suckers.
The base mesh is also from another project i'm working on, a character body replacement for the same game. A picture of him can be seen here if you fancy a peek - http://img476.imageshack.us/img476/8971/beefybodyiz9.jpg (the textures aren't mine unfortunately ).

Here's the concept piccy i threw together the other day -


And the model as it stands now, currently at 1344 polys (2398tri) including the basemesh -



C+C always welcome. Updates when i got em!

ill_logic

that concept's pretty alright. you're probably not so much worried about that, but the stance is a little awkward as the hip is turned toward the pov but the foot is behind the character. that & the arms look a wee bit stubby.

the armor could use some optimizing. there are some simpler areas with tons of detail & visa versa. and depending on the engine, the armor might not need to be one piece. it looks like you're wasting a few polys there towards the bottom getting the base part of the armor to link into the tasset-y part.

-J

Wells

when people talk about polycounts, just assume they're speaking of the tri-count. thats what matters.

I'm surprised the base mesh is that low... looks like the hands alone eat up a thousand.

I'd definitely separate the forms... those butt-flaps don't need to be attached, for instance.

tda

Cheers for the crits guys! You're right, i didn't include the the hands or the legs into the count. I was just using them as a reference to model around at the time, must have slipped my mind. I'll include everything in the shots in the next count.

Secutaurs- Yeah, the hands are huge on polys - 2798. For reference though, some of the armours in that game cap out at over 25kpolys, really detailed. I'd make my own hands from scratch no problem, but i'm pretty new to rigging and doing hands is still outta my league.

With regard to the flaps on his rear- They were originally just clipping through as the engine doesn't mind that, but i figured it'd be better to save the UV space that would be covered up and spend a couple of extra polys attaching them on.

Here's a quick update on him, total polycount for everything in the shot is 3191.

Wells

Its not wasting uv space if you know that part won't be seen and use it for something else. I just worry about animation with them joined like that. might be a huge pain in the ass.

tda

Yeah you're right, i can just shrink the UV's in that area and leave it pretty devoid of detail as it won't be seen 'cause of the flaps.
As is stands though there is no need to worry about animation because they're just going to be rigged 100% to the hips. Currently you can't make your own rigs for oblivion so i'm stuck adapting everything i make around their skeleton. It's a royal pain.

I will break em off though, if i ever want to take this into another engine i'll need em that way anyways and editing UV's + re-texturing is one of my pet hates.

Here's how he's sitting now at 4372poly. Haven't had a lot of time to work on him recently.