I am quite new to Blender but have learned quite a lot in the past couple weeks. One thing I am struggling with is the approach to modeling and which to take. I am currently developing a world of characters complete with armor, weapons, etc. I want to know if I model the character "naked’ first, then model the armor around the body mesh. Or, do I model the armor mesh directly from the body mesh? I want the characters to have different types of armor so I don’t know what approach is the best way. Any light on the subject would be greatly appreciated.
If your armor is going to be hard, non-deformable stuff, then using the character mesh as a starting point would be a simple way to go about it. Using separate meshes for body and armor sometime leads to poke through, where the armor doesn’t move quite enough to accomodate the underlying limb, which pokes through the armor. A simple way around this is to delete the underlying limbs, since you aren’t supposed to see them anyway. The character would wind up being just the visible parts – head, hands, parts of the leg perhaps.
If any part of the armor is going to be cloth (deformed by the cloth modifier, which includes heavy leather and chain mail) then the armor should be modeled to take the characteristics of the cloth system into account. Just using the character mesh to make shirts and pants can lead to clothes that sag in unlikely places.
thanks a lot for the help and so quick.