Armor Adjustments

For some reason, I’ve been struggling quite a lot to simply sit down and work on the armor pieces. Hard-surface isn’t my strength and I’m still working on my techniques for creating harsh edges and detail lines without losing the overall shape. The result of this was that the armor was quite rushed and still needs some additional work.

I was able to do something decently clever that I’m pleased about: all of the repeated armor pieces (the flat spiky plates) I was able to retopo once and then replicate all over the costume, sometimes scaled or mirrored. This means that they all use the same small texture space and are generally very efficient.

Unique armor retopo

The same cannot, unfortunately, be said about the rest of the armor pieces. In my rush, I knew I didn’t have time to carefully retopologize them, but neither could I bake a few-million-poly armor set. I ended up simply running ZBrush’s decimation master plugin on the pieces, auto-unwrapping them in Maya, and baking onto those.

The end result is a very clean mesh in every other way with a complete jumbled, triangle-filled mess for all of the unique armor pieces. Visually, however, this process worked completely fine: the seams aren’t visible, and the polycount remains quite low, so it wasn’t the worst outcome (just don’t look under the hood!).