DOTA2 Chen Re-Re-Re-Work

I did 2 days of research and sketching... Lord, 2 FULL days pretty much (I did go to work friday hah). Watching videos of people playing Chen watching videos of learning DOTA2 (b/c I realised I need to learn more about the game and get semi decent at it before I can make really great designs). Anyway looking at tons of conecpt art on anything armor related, history of armor, armor of the ages and areas like japan, etc.  Anyway I had this awesome idea. spent hours today painting it up...

...then realized Fock! There's no belt or body slot!!!! AAARGH! Only shoulders, arms and head! You'd think I'd get that, or that its obvious, but that's not even all. The texture size for characters on a mount (meaning they are slightly smaller in game) is REALLY small. I developed this cool technique for making details in armor in 3D Coat but with shoulders at 128x256 how much of that is going to be readable? crap! so back to the drawing board earlier today but luckily I've got a day+ of solid researching and other tricks came about. I saw that Chens armor is mostly about silhouette  Its like I'm learning how to concept characters the way they tell you too but out of pain of doing it "my way" until I get why there's a process people/pro's suggest. Argh why do I have to learn the hard way? Aaanyway So I skip back to 3d and mess around with silhouette and came up with this.

Its rough-ish. I like the armor, and there's not a whole lot of poly's left to do stuff with. Infact I'll have to reduce this if I want to keep the tassels (which I'm not THAT attached to)  I think the most work at this point is on the mount armor. That's probably the most prominent item in game. Anyway, Its been rough, I was hoping a vision of somehting would hit me but no, its been sketching and re-re-reworking back to sketching... thinking anyway here's where its at as of now.