STEP1 - Getting started - Mesh Preparation and Base Material
The base of this workflow begins at the modeling stage. The modeling process of all the armor's parts was pretty similar:
Step 1 - work on the base shape of the armor's part and prepare it's topology for the details to come with as few polygons as possible (note that It may seam I used more than the minimal amount of required polygons but that is only because the end result required many sharp corners) to be able to easily modify it later on if that would be required. these polygons receive polygon ID 1.
Step 2 - Add Shell modifier to the model and set "Override Edge Mat ID" to 2. Once I decide the model's base shape is final I collapse the shell to editable poly and modify the edge polygons a bit further as I find fit.
Step 3 - Take advantage of the prepared topology from step 1 to extrude the polygons in (to prepare the socket), Change their ID into 3 and then extrude them out to create the diamonds.
Step 4 - (optional) In some of the armor's parts I've used another polygon ID - 4 for silver when I wanted more variation in the materials, this was also used for the sword's blade.
Throughout the modeling process I've had the base material ready for early testing, the base material is made out of 100% procedural maps and that is why it did not require me to unwrap the model as I was still working on it, the complex final stage of the texturing only came once I've decided modeling was done.
The base material is made out of a Multi sub object with 4 ID's 1- The main armor's metal, 2 - The armor's outer gold, 3 - The diamonds, 4 - Silver. I will focus this tutorial on the main armor's metal.
For the base main armor metal material (ID 1) I thought of going for a standard material But decided to go with Mental ray's A&D shader because it supports blurry reflections, A decision that made the material pretty heavy but look good :-)
The parameters I've decided to add maps to are Diffuse color, Bump, Glossiness, Reflection color. The idea is to add MATCHING maps with different color brightness levels to these parameters while keeping this in mind:
brighter colors mean:
diffuse color - brighter diffuse colors.
Bump - outer dents.
Glossiness - sharper reflections / highlights.
Reflection color - stronger reflections.
(Obviously, darker colors below 50% gray would mean the opposite).
The map I've created for these parameters was made out of a few procedural textures, this made it easy to control the brightness level of the colors for each of the parameters - for example - in one of the specific textures, I used a bright color for the dirt in the diffuse color but changed it to dark in the bump map to make it cause an inner dent and also dark in the reflection color because this dirt is supposed to be less reflective then the armor's metal. Making the base material with procedural textures is also good because a simple combination of a few procedural textures can hold a very high res detail level at a low resource cost and every single armor part will have different detail features (as opposed to mapped texture files which tend have duplicated features look).
I'm not gonna go through all the specific parameters of each map because many different combinations can work just fine and it is all a meter of trial and adjustments, you can look at the shading network chart I've made to get the idea. My advice for this step is to add one map at a time, and always make sure you keep track of the contribution each map gives to the details. It sometimes helps to copy the specific map you are working on to a clean new material and apply it to the model just to check how it fits it.
Tip - I often use an Ambient occlusion map as a mix map at the base of the diffuse color for added depth detail - for the white color I simply add the maps I was gonna use anyway and for the dark color I add some noise maps for "corner dirt".
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