Golden Armor - Real time

Hi ! I'm Eva Barbé, a fifth year Game Art student at ArtFX.

One of my favorite genre of video game is dark fantasy, and It's been a while since I was thinking of doing a personal project inspired by this kind of universe. And so, during April, I spend my full time recreating Golden Armor from Ariel Perez. When I saw this artwork, the first thing I thought of was "Wow It's so badass ! This would look amazing in 3D !" and because of this, I wanted to try the challenge to recreate this guy.

For this project, to add more spice, I fixed myself two unbreakable rules : The model must be extremely loyal to the concept, and it must be finished within one month. I'm kind of happy to have perfectly estimated the work time on this project, because starting April 1st 2021 to April 29th 2021, all the assets were finished without any rushes or stress.

The Process

High poly modeling

High poly modeling was my first step in the creation, and the one I was the most familiar with. Sculpting is my favorite phase, but I knew it was also the longest and the most rigorous. I sculpted this model by pieces : when I totally finished the Head, I go to the torso, and when the torso is finished, I go on the shoulder, etc...

In order to keep a maximum loyalty to the original concept, I performed multiple times a trick : I would screen my working piece at a right camera angle, and copy/paste it in Photoshop with the concept art open. By superposing the two, I was able to see what was good, and what I had to change.

Globally, the sculpting part was not very difficult, because the concept is not so complex in the first place. However, I had some problem with the calves, because they are a bit oddly shaped, but I managed to find something that satisfied me.

I knew that I wouldn't be able to recreate at 100% the concept because of one thing : the way he hold his shield. I personally think Ariel did this in order to have a great view on the legs and right shoulder, and if it's voluntary, he made the right choice. I prefer to have to change a bit the pose to give him a firmer hold on shield than having to imagine what's behind X element. I actually had to do this for the back and the hands, but by taking inspiration from the other patterns, it was not that difficult. I maybe do have struggled a bit to conceptualize the posterior plate, because it was difficult to imagine something that is not looking stupid from back view...

Retopology

After more than two weeks spent on the sculpt, it was time for retopology. For this step, I prefer to use Maya, as it is simple, and has some great tools by default. I did not fixed myself a rule about a polycount limitation with this model. I wanted it to be optimised, but without forgetting about the details, like the small finger plates. I was quite surprised to see the armor at 23k tris, mostly thanks to the torso that get all its details baked.

I gave a bit more polygon density  to the weapons, as I wanted them to have smooth volumes and edges when zoomed.

After two days on retopology, UV could be made in minutes, because the different patrons are very easy to spot on the geometry.

Bake

Before going to posing, I did some baking and texturing tests in substance painter to see if all work. I baked each armor pieces one by one, this include : the two shoulderpads, the two tabards, the torso, the legs, the calves, the feets, the gloves, the sword and the shield. For texture optimisation, some parts that are perfectly symmetrical, like the pauldrons, the gloves, and all the lower limbs parts were baked only on one side.

After I finished tweaking the low poly, and I gained all the final baked maps for each element, I had to pack all the armor UV into one big 4k texture. For this, I took some time on photoshop to merge all the armor baked textures, including normals, Ambient occlusion, and other maps like curvature that would be necessary for me later to work in Substance Painter.

Posing

After I was sure of my low poly model result, I could start the step I was the most impatient to do : the posing. I find it so satisfying to see a character going from a T-pose to a more natural one ! For this, I used Maya Quick Rig tool, because I did not wanted to spent too much time working on a complex rig. Luckily, my character is an humanoïd, and Quick Rig works perfectly for this kind of morphology. I only had to implement manually bones inside the tabard, because it's not supported in this tool. I actually spent multiples hours to do a clean weight paint, as I did not wanted my character to had some weird deformations.

My inspiration for the pose was of course from the concept. I gave him a bit more combat-ready stance, still, without changing too much the original pose from the artwork. By doing this, He could look a bit more "On guard", and have a firmer hold on his sword and shield, which something that I think is missing on the original concept.

Texturing & Final polish

So, at this point, I had less than one week before my personal deadline was reached, which was quite ok. Because I already worked and done some tests on the texture during the baking phase, I had some idea where to go.

It's clear that the most important texture, on this model is the gold. His name is "Golden Armor", after all. But... After multiple tests during the baking phase, I realised that only one shade of gold looked plain. And so, by taking the first gold texture I made as a base, I duplicated it and started making a dark and light variant.

I love this reference, because I find it to have great synergy with gold, mostly because of the yellowish lighter areas. Notice that I sculpted the leather on the high poly and also some of the damages on it, but even with this, I chosed to add a height map on top of it as it looked better.

During my work on the texture, I often had my Marmoset window on one of my screen next to the other with  subtance painter. This way, I was able to see if the model locked good outside Subtance painter, in a real-time rendering software. Even If shame on me, at one moment I spent 3 hours looking why my model doesn't look the same on my two software before realising... my two computers monitors simply had different colors. At least, I know this will not happen anymore in the future, haha.

The more time I continued, the more I worked on the render, and the texture didn't need tweaks anymore. Even, the last tweaks I had done on the texture was to open the base color maps in photoshop and downgrade a bit the saturation.

And it became at one point... where I don't see any tweaks to make anymore. The model was finally made, after one month !

Real-Time renders