Knights

This is another model I created for Computer Arts Practice, again trying to work in all the things I have been practicing and learning in this module to try and produce a higher standard of work.

These are intended as background characters for the scene I'm working on, so they were always planned to not be as detailed as the "hero" character. They were also an exercise in modularity as I planned to create a lot of individual pieces that could be made into different combinations of knight.

From a design perspective this required researching different types of knight armour, and deciding how I was going to design the pieces I chose. I've inserted some of my reference imagery below.

The idea to make them modular came from the way a lot of games such as Unreal III and Skyrim build their enemies. They have a set of parts and pieces, and using a certain sense of logic they are combined differently to create the illusion of variety in the characters.

 I've included a screenshot from Unreal III's character creator, in which the player is able to choose from all the pre-existing parts to create their own character.

In the end I gravitated towards three types of helm as a starting point. The "Frog Mouthed", the "Bascinet" and the "Sallet". After drawing up a concept of some of the different pieces I planned to produce I began modelling the knights.  Ive inserted part of the concept below, aswell as the initial helm models.

From here I then proceeded to model the full set of armour. Some pieces remain the same between knights and others are different. In the end I feel like I was left with a reasonable selection for making different knights.