Story so far…
Learned a lot doing the retop on all the spikes and hoops. Took ages and I’m still kinda clunky moving the duplicates into position and lining them up with the hipolys but at least I can get it done without too much faffing about now. As with all these things I can dial it in with practice.
Once I had the neck and chest pieces done I had a fiddle about with the chain that holds the neckpiece on to the chestpiece using splines and arrays. It seemed easiest to do using a double section of chain link for each section rather than a single one. My reasoning is that controlling the comparatively small volumetric area where the two links meet will mean I have as much leeway as possible for rotation without clipping through the small eyelet hooks. Chain is a bit too chunky, I’ll thin it down just a tad later on.
For now here’s my wires so far and a normal map thingybob cos I was having a blast doing the screenshot and I chucked a bit of effort in as I’ve always really dug this kind of thing when I’ve seen others do it. Hopefully there’s a slight improvement in topology as we travel down from the helmet to the neck to the chest. Still really new to this and everything I have to retop is a new puzzle to be solved right now. I think I’m just about at the stage where solving said puzzles is becoming fun, tho, as opposed to the - pulling my hair out - thing it was before. I’m hoping by the time I’ve done the last piece I should a bit quicker and a lot better at it so I can then go back and redo all these initial pieces if necessary.
Oh, and the quick, non-tilable google image search texture on the chain led to predictable results. Make it procedural - another item on my todo list.
