When approaching the design I used the masking tool in ZBrush in order to get accurate and clean shapes for my character’s armour. Using the deformation function ‘polish’, I managed to clean the topology of the chestplate, along with using the ZRemesher tool in order to decrease the polygon count into something more optimised and functional for the mesh, which I had not done for previous 3D modelling projects and found that my polygon count was too high for what my models were. Utilising this mistake as a stepping stone, I made sure to integrate a habit into my workflow that would make sure that my polygon count was as optimised as could be. I also learned through several tutorials that mesh topology could be further optimised by using the ZRemodeler brush, which I used to correct, deduce and add polygons that were needed.
It was my first experience doing hard surface modelling on a character, so I decided to look up many tutorials regarding the practice in order to gain habits that were necessary for efficient modelling. I mainly used the ‘How to Create Clean Hardsurface in ZBrush’ guide by Abe Leal 3D, which ended up teaching me many basic and necessary practices for my project. Rather than using the extrude tool to give thickness to any of the objects I used the Subdivision levels tool, where thickness can easily be adjusted and adapted to the shape of the object . Using the subdivide tool, I gave every object the appropriate level of thickness, thinking about the weight and necessary amount of protection. I used various polygon modelling techniques like insetting faces, extrusion, bevelling and inserting faces in order to give the desired subtools borders like armour trims. Looking back on my design, I decided to use the trims/borders I was making in order to achieve the extruding patterns that I conceptualised and that I would add the more curved areas in later when I do the high-poly details so that I could bake them on later as I have not baked much into my previous projects, and thus decided that I would incorporate that progress into my workflow. Constantly looking back to my references, I realised that the plating on the hip should have a clear connecting point with the main chestplate. So, as is present in many old models of armour, I added buckles- suggesting protection as well as full mobility in the suit.
After coming back to the project, I found that my chestplate subtool had corrupted, which resulted in this:
I did not know the error that could have led to this corruption, but I surmise it was due to too many insertions near a poly-loop, which would result in empty ‘gaps’ between a line of vertices though it would appear flat. Due to this error, I had to remake the entire chestplate, but made sure to avoid mistakes like the potential one I made.
This new chestplate was indeed more stable than the other one and the topology, especially for the neck hole area was actually much better than the last one.