Runic Knight
In honor of the upcoming Elden Ring, I wanted to create an armourset that had a similar Celt/Saxon/Roman-Gallic hybrid etc leaning aesthetically in tribute, also as someone of Scottish/English ancestry, I very rarely see Insular Art represented in games, as I believe it very hard to tackle, so seeing much of it on display in Elden Ring made me very excited. Because of this, much of Elden Ring has a very early medieval Arthurian era look to things, much more Celt than Gothic as was seen in Dark Souls.
Lord Gwyn has a very ancient celt look to him, so I felt there was a basis in Dark Souls to make an armourset that might have come from that same time period, in an ancient bronze age like era.
This is all based loosely on an unused concept art for Dark Souls, but I wanted something more asymmetrical and layered. I utilized the old Irish Book of Kells as reference for the cloth patterns, it has a very colorful yet chaotic and religious look to it's pages. I also found the original concept would've worked less ideal ingame as the older engine + scale coat would result in a lot of very obvious stretching and warping near the legs, so I opted for more of a split surcoat and more rigid adornments.
My weight skinning and rigging job isn't the best as it's not my specialty, there's always more polish to be done, but I'm happy with how it's turned out.
Armourset in total: just under 50k tris
Sword + scabbard: roughly 3k tris
Shield: roughly 2k tris
Could have gone much lower, but there was no performance reason, aimed to just give the assets what I felt they wanted.
*In case anyone asks*
Entire armourset made from start to ingame complete in just under a month in total time. I wasted a fair amount of time designing and figuring out what I wanted though, typically this should've taken me weeks if I had a more solid idea from the start.
The sword is a kind of amalgam of Roman, Celt and Saxon sword styles, like a strange Gladius.
The shield is again, an amalgam of Saxon, Celt and Roman styles, a more armoured Hellenic style shield.
I find it's faster to not even bother modeling accessories posed on character and just pose them in low poly.
The sword and shield were made in under a day each from zero concept to completion ingame, these high poly's took roughly 2-3 hours.
I'm able to quickly load in exported animations from the game and test during skinning and see how various things clip.
Fromsoftware have a very neat categorization of armour pieces for their games which I stuck to.
Ingame there's a decent amount of clipping, however I feel it comes down to a balance of rigidity vs stretching. In this case I wanted to preserve the form of solid parts/plates more than I cared about things clipping.
Matching the icon render style from Dark Souls is pretty tricky to get exact with the shadows, but I got a decent non destructive solution in Marmoset, and able to capture all the icons at once.
Item descriptions is also something that can really give life and a bit of mystery to an item. Writing these up is something I really enjoy.
