I did this for a demo for a potential client. As far as the demo goes, it’s done, but I would still like to take it a bit further, e.g. the shields need some more scratches and dents, the background is quite empty, the clump of shields is too “perfect” (I dupliverted them to icospheres), etc. One other thing I’ll have to fix is the fact that the cloak lost its cloth bake (again!), so I’ll have to re-bake it to make sure it doesn’t lift up around the warrior’s shoulder. I’m not sure why the baking is lost every now and then (without me editing the cloth).
In order to save time, I used a MakeHuman model to start off with, but I rigged him in order to control his pose.
…and here is the original image that provided the inspiration. One can see that the shields in there has a lot more character in terms of dents and holes. I’ll try to make time to fix that.
Note: I did not try to make a copy of the original.
I did the demo in quite a hurry, so the .blend file is in quite a mess. I did not even bother naming the bones, as I just wanted to use them to set the soldier’s stance. And it is over 5MB large.
So I’d prefer not share it in its’ current state…
For what it’s worth, I attach some non-subsurfed wireframes.
Wow, that’s really good! It’s too clean though, everything needs dirt and holes
As far as baking goes, you may have bake directory set to your systems temporary folder. That way it would get cleaned out sometimes. I’m not sure where the setting for this is with cloth but with fluid it’s in the fluid panel of the domain so I suspect it is similar with cloth, just look for a directory setting around the cloth panel and change it to somewhere near the blendfile or a central bake directory if you want one. I realize this is probably more relevant with animations but it may work.
You also might be able to apply the cloth or edit the bake and then you could use proportional translation to move it over his shoulders seeing as it’s a still.
For the shileds looking less “perfect,” you could just move the icosphere’s vertices around to give it a random look or you could turn on proportional editing and use “random falloff”.
