At a point in my most recent project I have been spending some of my free time working on that I feel it is time to share.
I initially created this piece about a year ago with the hopes that It would be a short project, however with the last two posts I managed to get distracted 3 different occasions and it fell into my backlog of unfinished personal projects. I decided to fully remake my gambeson from the ground up as the initial design was created based on a sketch concept that I made on my iPad.Along with this I recently made a free gambeson stitch brush that I used to help create the design. https://artstn.co/m/K33wv
You'll notice one my stitching lines were put in place it made it a lot easier to go and add my desired padding later using inflation and masking.
The original gambeson design was almost 1:1 with my concept in terms of overall boldness and stitching patterns. This however translated into an unrealistic and exaggerated piece that did not match the style of the rest of the costume. Lastly the lack of any belt retention or functionality left it as feeling overly simple which would have worked for a 2d design or a stylized version. However, with my choice of art direction this needed to be completely redesigned.
I really enjoy how the stitching sometimes causes the surface folds from the padding underneath to change direction or even stop completely. I generally try to to be too overt with my smaller fabric texturing as some of this will also be done inside of substance painter. However, folds on the other hand (for the most part) must be done before hand.
Much of my design after my concept was heavily inspired by real world props and functional pieces so here is my pure-ref.
Lastly here is a turnaround of the most recent progress. I posed all the accessories for this just to make it look better the positions of many of them are not final.
Some of the major next steps are going through and adding detail to all of the smaller belts and buckles. Along with the armor itself which I have already begun adding some detail in zbrush.