Originally Posted by Pandemonica
Originally Posted by vometia
[snippetty-doo-dah]

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!

Believe it or not, in the majority of smaller studios, Blender is the major 3D software, and it is definately professional level. In the larger studios, there is also ZBrush, but if you learn Blender, you can use most other major software bundles with very little transition. It mostly comes down to sculpting experience, and the familiarity of the tools and hotkeys. Personally, I have found sculpting to be easier for modeling rather than vertex. Not to mention, Blender works very well with Unreal. It has incredible built in tools for clothing, physics etc. It is definitely a different ball game from my days in 3DSM 10 years ago.

Originally Posted by Droata
You can create all your armors on a basemesh and apply the surface deform modifier. Create blendshapes of your different body types on the basemesh and all your surfaced deformed armors will automatically deform to fit.

I usually use procedural textures or tiled textures for the base material whenever I can, and just use decals with image textures all over the model to create detail. Not only does this allow for good resolution on closeups without insane 32k image textures, but it also reduces stretching in the textures when deforming. If you are using image textures though, just fine-tune the UVs for each body shape before exporting the FBX for that version of the armor.

Also, Blender is as professional as anything out there. Check out the CGI in Man in the High Castle.

Oh, yeah, I hope it didn't look like I was dis'ing Blender or anything like that. I was thinking more in terms of the overall workflow, some of which may only exist in my imagination as vaguely wondrous things, and in Larian's case they're using RAD's Granny 3D stuff AFAIK. But the biggest tool in any modeller's arsenal is knowledge and that's what I sorely lack: the one-vertex-at-a-time approach (usually with various types of fall-off) has been enough to let me scrape by for 15 years' worth of meddling with other people's models and occasionally creating my own but sculpting and whatever you call the thing where you apply the same deform to multiple models are completely beyond my understanding. I feel I should've learnt a bit more in that time but my experience with modelling tends to be "argh" and then "I'm glad that's over!" once I'm finally where I need to be so I've never really developed it further.

The pain was multiplied with games like Dragon Age Oranges and Ego Draconis that needed three models for various detail levels because in Blender 2.49 trying to do a poly reduce usually resulted in a lot of repair work to fix anomalies that were obvious even at a distance. It's a lot less painful in never versions but still a bit of a faff overall. I suspect there's ways of automating it and scripting stuff is my usual approach to repetitive tasks but I predicted potentially more frustration than it would save me...

J'aime le fromage.