Originally Posted by Alexandrite
I wonder how much design effort it takes to adapt armour onto different 3D model body types?

Depends. I'm not a professional modeller (in fact I'm barely an amateur) so my experiences are limited, especially with industry-standard software, but it can be a case of just stretching a given model to fit so you have the small and large extremes, which is Skyrim's approach, to completely different body types which involve pretty much making it from scratch for each one. They have their pros and cons; the stretching can look weird as it will be compounded as the character moves, though some careful design should theoretically avert it or at least make it not too obvious; completely different models can be tailored to the character type in question in much the same way as light, medium and heavy armours look different (even if the underlying model is the same) but obviously the effort involved quickly ramps up.

There's effort and effort, though. It's a lot less effort for an experienced modeller with professional software than it is for my one-vertex-at-a-time approach in Blender!

J'aime le fromage.