creating Armour plates

Rather that using textures for detail, sometimes geometry can give better results

01 design your pattern

Using splines, draw each plate and arrange them as you need to. Don’t worry too much about perfect alignment of the plates. Try to introduce interesting grids and patterns at this stage.

02 experiment with your plates

Clone, scale, and rotate basic combinations of plates to generate complexity. Remember that this process is iterative – the more scales and rotations you introduce, the richer the final pattern.

03 use Additional plates

Fill in the gaps between large cloned areas with additional plates, smaller than the base pattern – it links everything together. Aim to obscure the outlines of the smaller elements you created in Step 2.

04 Attach splines And extrude

After attaching the splines, we need to extrude the final pattern. The pattern object can be rotated against the hull surface, or the hull can be moved to match. Objects don’t have to align exactly but avoid complicated overlaps.

05 use the edit poly modifier

Use Boolean with the basic hull surface and the pattern. Apply Edit Poly modifier and that automatically selects the new faces generated. Delete the other faces (invert selection), and flip normals.

06 tidy it up

Extrude, then bevel the faces or chamfer all edges (convert face selection to edge, grow selection once, then apply chamfer). Finally, clean up extra vertices.