Final Project Pt.2 - Souls Root Armor

Final Project Pt.2 - Souls Root Armor

High Poly Process:

For each armor piece, I created a very low zRemeshed blockout mesh that I could easily edit proportions and add panel lining using ZModeler.  I do all work at this stage on a mesh with no thickness so I can easily edit the surface and edges without worrying about the mesh collapsing on itself. Thickness is added at the last step before I start sculpting the details using PanelLoops under Geometry>EdgeLoop. 

Settings for adding thickness

I prefer this method to dynamic subdivision thickness since that will sometimes cause issues around the corners. Panel loops gives me pretty clean geo that can be easily cleaned up if necessary. After I have the mesh at this stage, I crease certain edges and apply subdivision levels to do the detail sculpting.

I ran into some issues at this stage as I could not get the results I wanted from my usual brushes. I wanted to do the detailed linework with the layer brush since that gives clean intersections with Morph Target, but many of the brushes I tried gave really crunch strokes. The Orb Cracks brush gave the best lines, but the overlap interaction would have required a lot of cleanup. The best solution I found was the ScribeChisel brush since it uses curve functions and could also be adjusted. Having not used curves much before, I didn't know how effective this would be but after a little bit I definitely think this is the best approach.

Just as a disclaimer, this is not to say the layer and chisel brushes aren't good, it is more of a situational thing. The chisel brush is incredible for consistent hard surface panel lining, and the layer brush can do some awesome detailing - see Nick Galan's spearhead as an example.

Continuing on with the detail sculpting, I drew a linework guide with polypaint following the design in the reference. I ended up masking it out to a polygroup so I could easily toggle its visibility without having to go through the menus. I only did this for the very noticeable details of the ref since it is time consuming. From here, I could start placing my ScribeChisel lines on layers.