FMP: Week 10 - Weekend guilt drive edition

I felt like I was progressing too slow so I got mad at myself and set up a strict deadline to hit a few spots I wanted to hit over the weekend. 

I started with adding details to the cape trims and subdividing them:

^Wonky spots flattened by "Make Planar" in Max, getting rid of unnecessary loops.

I felt like the shoes should be more interesting and have some form of detailing. Jordan kindly helped me by pointing out some great details which could enhance their design:

Before

After

Next it was time to add some damage to the leg guards. I decided not to include trims&metal swirls as I agreed with Jordan that with all the material breaks and different pieces in that area they're not needed.

Subdivided base, used TrimDynamic and some other brushes on the leather edge. I decided not to mess with the high poly too much because I can add a lot of the wear&tear in the texturing phase.

When adding the details, I swapped into a material which allowed me to see dents and breakups a little better.

Correctly subdivided at last.

For the top leg guard, I had to go through some mild troubleshooting. Whenever I tried to subdivide and subsequently sculpt on it, my laptop would start lagging and I with each stroke I made, Zbrush seems to have attempted to subdivide the subtool all anew. Restart or troubleshooting in Zbrush did not work, so I GoZ-d the guard into 3dsMax and GoZ-d it back. This took some additional time but it worked :)

Adding dents. When I studied the Wild Rift reference, it seemed like there weren't too many dents present, so I tried not to overdo it. 

I also decided to break up the symmetry with the top leg guard because the symmetry started to feel a little obvious with more dents and slashes visible:

Another thing I wanted to do was subdivide the wings. To do this, I had to Polygroup and crease the edges but that fortunately did not take long as I had almost no triangles in my topology and could easily select the edges with Polyloop + Flat in ZModeler.

I moved onto adjusting the bracelet. When I first modeled it, I wanted to avoid having too many subtools and tried to attach every bit of the bracelet together into one object (excl. the gem), but as I tried to subdivide it, it became quite messy kept losing the shape no matter what control loops I added. I therefore decided to adjust the base model and model-in a separate piece of topology which would "hold" the gem and make it look nicer.

New, separated topology. Subdivided, cleaner.

Old topo

Another thing on my list was adding detailing to the archer glove. Hardly visible but I added seams and wrinkles:

Highest subdiv

Lowest subdiv

The final point on my list was adding dents/chips to the armor. I've encountered the same problem as I did with the leg guard, where ZBrush subdivided with each stroke and lagged. After half an hour of importing and reimporting the issue was fixed :') I did the chips with Stored Morph Target so I could potentially change them if I didn't like them later:

Setting up the strict deadline and listing all the points helped me immensely. Though the things I showed in this post might not seem like major changes, most of them were time-consuming things I've been putting off, that had to be done in order to keep everything clean. I'll set up a new strict deadline in the upcoming days to finally get this long overdue model done :D