FE Armor WIP5 - FE Top highpoly (Patreon)

- Done ... finally. Been at this one for 3 (?) weeks now, hopefully it's worth the effort in the end, I guess you'll be the judge of that. Not gonna lie, I'm a bit burned out looking at it. In fact I've been working on something else alongside this thing just to have a break from it. Not sure if that helped or made it worse since it made it feel and take even longer in the end heh.

- You're actually looking at a 100 million polygon model. I don't think I've ever gone over 100 million before ... huh. It's not just the top though, the pants/body are part of the same scene since it looked weird without them and those are something like 20 mil. The big polycount is mostly just because of the number of plates and the small surface detail on them, it would've been a lot more modest otherwise.

- Speaking of numbers, this thing has the strange gift of looking so damn simple, but it had sooo many pieces to take care of, belts, plates, cloth pieces, decorations, you name it. I think this top has something like 250 different parts/meshes ( though 150 of those are the small rounded bolts all across it ... seriously though, what's up with concept artists and belts/bolts ? Every damn concept art has a gazillion belts and bolts lol )

- I kinda remodeled the bracers/arm plates part way through. I was going to use the ones from my blockout and refine them, but those, I mostly eyeballed, and when checked, they were very inaccurate when compared to the concept. Since I like the look of it, I didn't want to deviate if at all possible from it

(they're very accurate now though hehe. You'll just have to trust me that most other parts are similarly accurate :P)

- There is one thing that being accurate to the concept didn't exactly turn out great. The concept itself doesn't make any sense in most places lol.
One pet peeve of mine when I look at a 3d model is when things just float and aren't attached to anything, I absolutely hate that shit. Sometimes it's done for technical reasons (clipping/rigging) and sometimes it's just to save time, but no matter the reason I always notice it in games and heavily dislike it. I always try to have things make sense on my models and be attached to something, but here ... well, as mentioned, the concept doesn't make sense. I had to choose between accuracy or changing things and I chose the former. Result is some plates kinda just float there ... not the best, but what are you gonna do :(

- I tried to keep armor damage to a minimum and just have some subtle dings and scratches, mostly surface break up to have more interesting metal reflections. Also feels like the clean look is more suited to an elf armor. Truth is though that I'm not sure how this is gonna turn out in the end, I haven't done medieval/fantasy armor in years and never at this quality level, I'm a bit inexperienced with that :(

- Anyway, this should be done and out in another week, give or take a couple of days. Afterwards just the gloves remain, which by comparison are very simple and should take barely any time.