This is a redux of a previous image, but with leather armour completely made from scratch using a combination of blender, zbrush, and substance painter. How it good it looks isn’t proportional to how much time and effort went into it, but that’s how learning goes.

It’s also cool to be able to do more and more from scratch. There is nothing wrong with using existing assets, but it’s nice not to HAVE to do so. And really, it’s almost impossible to make something 100% from scratch in any reasonable workflow. If you make bread “from scratch”, did you mill the flour? Did you grow the wheat? Did you make your own fertilizer? :)

That said, it still feels cool to know that nearly everything in this picture was meaningfully made by me, with the exception of:

* The cloud background, which is a CC-0 HDRI

* The pony head, sort of. Every vertex was placed by me, but I did put work into capturing the shape of the JuiceDane head everyone uses, because I really like how it looks

* The various noise textures that are layered together as part of the leather texture.

* Cadance’s body from neck to knees, which is shamelessly ripped from a Daz g3f model, because zomg the topology and corrective shapekeys are so good.

Hell, I even made the 3-dimensionally accurate wood grain shader used by the bow and arrow shaft. I should release that, actually.

But just like how a painter doesn’t always mix their own paints from raw materials if they want to get much of anything done, I won’t always work like this, but it’s good to be able to. Ideally I want to only use existing assets because I CHOOSE to, not because I have to.

Also at https://derpibooru.org/1722721

Unarmoured version here: https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/stellarator/princess-cadance-as-cupid