As a 3D / game designer I do understand the bending issue though. This will get long, and have a lot of info, but not nearly enough to completely explain it, just to give an idea... And I ABSOLUTELY understand that the review of an armor from a game has to look at these things as they are, not as they could be. Makes it more interesting to watch, and you learn more about how real armor works, so this is by no means to try and change the view on the armors. Just to explain the design side for people who like to know ;) If you want armor to be physically correct, you have to design everything separate, and have it animated individually. Sounds simple, but there are 3 things you NEED to keep as low as possible: 1: textures. More / bigger textures means you need a LOT more RAM. And it stacks up VERY fast. 2: vertices. The "pixels" so to speak, that hold 3D models together. 3D shapes are made up of triangles. The points are called vertex (vertices for multiple). If you have too many of them, it REALLY slows down the system, because it needs to calculate every triangle separately. 3: Physics calculations. These calculations slow down your system a LOT. If you have more independent pieces, you have to design the model with more "bones" to define how each piece can move. Every piece has its own texture. And since it's a separate shape, the computer has to calculate the triangles of that shape, AND of the model underneath! Sure, it might be invisible, but the computer doesn't know that if it doesn't calculate it. And every extra piece needs its own physics calculations. And really: designing it accurately is often a LOT easier than designing it optimized for performance.
That's how I imagined it working. Plus all that detail would mainly pay off during movement like combat. And during combat, you are not watching tassets move around. I suggest to do this more realistically you'd need a way to do an animation efficiently that 'pretends' they are moving. Maybe just a blur, or jiggle. Maybe if you could find another thing already modelled and mirror it?
In FFXIV, this leads to the funny effect that taller shoes make your character's legs shorter. (or more accurately, the shoes are part of the leg and the leg keeps its lenght)
If I may add to that: if each pieces of armor are independent models, they have to be rigged for animators to move properly with the body while also not clip (phase) through each other. The animators are then restricted in their range of motion. But the catch here is: it's motion captured animation. The actors are in tight mocap suits and are not moving with a huge accurate armor on them. So making the armor a single mesh (skin) that can bend with the body, while still unrealistic, will let the actors motion be transfered to the armor. On the other end, I think a full physics driven armor would no only be hard to render in real time, but pieces may start clipping or flipping in every directions they can when the tension builds up while actors are moving in directions not physically possible for solid objects.
The way I think about armors in cases like this are that they are "suggesting" what the armor is when you look at it but from a practical standpoint the in game armor will have to bend and mold like a skin. Going for the look without the function in game for all the reason you point out
I do a lot of the same making items in the virtual world "Second Life", and the combination of skeleton and vertices is at the heart of it. And, if you see the mesh of vertices as skin,. and the bones of the skeleton as as rigid, you need extra data to define the effect of the muscles under the skin.. You would have the same to define how a knitted sweater moves. In a game a character might never take off a sweater. In a virtual world you can have several layers which have to work together. "Second Life" also uses textures and vertex meshes of varying level of complexity, to allow for a range of viewing distances. There is a lot of jargon. And a lot of what happens in games has been a staple of films. Is a director saying, "I want to this" and different? The tools have changed.
Loved the armor review. What a delightful christmas present. I would like to suggest a new tier just below "I'd wear it", called "It's magic!" for armors that look beautiful and you'd wear it but it would require magic to exist and and a transformation cutscene for you to wear it
10:00 To answer the question: Yes, the armor is very much magical. It gets beamed onto her by goddess magic in a cutscene. Also, being an Aasimar (she's the daughter of the goddess Selûne) means she has wings. Yay, mobility! Although her leg armor being weird is a funny headcanon explanation as to why she is so prone to falling over in combat. (Pardon the pun XD)
This is objectively correct. Besides she's an immortal so the armor's aesthetics might be more important than their function. edit: she has that priestess girlfriend to impress after all.
Came to say exactly this! As a side note, in D&D there's actually a type of magical armor, called cast-off armor, where its entire gimmick is that it comes off magically. Point being; The idea of armor that is designed to be taken off and put on magically isn't unique to Baldur's gate. Obviously, having armor that you don't have to worry about 'putting on,' and that you could just have on whenever you need it, allows for some very unique designs that would probably be even more effective than real armor.
@Necroes Cast-off armor: "For when you want to give your players magical armor but don't want to deal with the 23 AC Warforged Paladin." Or someone wants to play a literal heavy metal magical girl. 💫
True - but they were animating individual hairs in Shrek in 2001. I have to figure 20 years on, it should be doable if the programmers or the engine is up to it. The graphics card manufacturers' marketing departments keep insisting their hardware is capable.
@@ssgtmole8610 The main difference is Shrek is a film and Baldur's Gate 3 is a game. That means it is more limited as it has to animate everything in real time, even if it was made 20 years later.
@@ssgtmole8610 You confuse movie rendering with gaming rendering, Shrek was not rendered in real time, not even close. Film level renders are really time consuming( or require truly massive computing power( often both)). Plus with Shrek if something rendered goofy, they threw out the footage and tried again. It's the classic situation of Fast, high quality, and affordable. You can make it fast and high-quality, but then it'll only run on hardware that no end user would have . Or fast and runs on a reasonable hw spec, but then quality suffers , or high quality and runs on realistic hardware - in that case you are either doing pretenders video, or willing to live with horribly low FPS. As tech improves, and software gets better, and people get smarter at hiding the janky bits it gets better, but it's going to be a while before it gets there
@@ssgtmole8610 Oh, it's doable, but is it worth it? Or, rather, can player computers support it? Mega gamers perhaps, but the broader game playing base is more questionable. And even if a computer can physically handle the graphics, how much will it slow down the game and hinder smooth play? Shrek was one movie. Get it all animated and then everyone sees the same thing. Like a cut scene in a game. But for game play it's a whole extra level of work and system taxation.
Why I absolutely love it, animating different armor pieces moving without it being just a clipping mess is hard (you might be thinking you've seen clipping mess and it was ok, but no, you've seen good enough non clipping mess). Which is why you get so many breastplates expanding and contracting with just the idle's breathing. And yes, that armor is put on with moon magic. It just shows up on her.
Basicly the disconnect of design and craft. As a tailor i see designes all the time that look stunning but cant be done as depicted. We learn how to interpret it and make the closest to the design but that only really works when design and technical teams communicate. In a Videogame you can get away with the raw design, only when someone looks with a technical eye on it does it fall apart
I'm a simple woman, I see a Jill video, I must support for the cheese gods demand it. However I would happily watch many more videos of Jill does cardboard armor demo, this was really fun and thought provoking for me as someone who has taken the time and is still learning to smith armor.
Love this video! The fun and whimsey of just getting down and contructing something out of cardboard to wrap your mind around it is just hilarious! Videos like this is what makees your channele special!
Regarding the tassels, that's a limitation of the game engine. Your starting point is to animate someone in pants and shirt moving their limbs with the clothes moving very plastically. Then you ask whether it's worth adding support for free flowing bits. There's so much shit to build that mid-budget isometric games which BG3 is will say "no". Which doesn't stop the artists from painting free flowing bits but the accepted convention is to pretend they are free flowing
Heres how i interpret that armour: It's a big padded catsuit. The scales are stretched into it, as normal, but the large plate appliques have metal loops on the inside and cloth straps, where scales would be, stitch the plate segments to the catsuit, like overgrown scales. The front plate segment and blue ribbon hide the buttons where she squeezes into the suit every morning for at least 3 hours.
I'd like it to be considered that Dame Aylin can fly thus changing her needs for mobility in the legs, she really only needs her legs to be able to move in actions that assist her sword fighting and therefore could probably have rather structured leg armour. I'm not saying the armour design is done acknowledging this but rather as a thought for how a winged assimar would have different requirements.
When I was an apprentice, we were taught "Straight blades for curved lines and curved blades for straight lines." It might come in handy in future Cardboard Aided Design videos.
It is magic armour that her moon goddess mother beams directly onto her in a kind of magic girl anime cutscene when she's released from 100 years of imprisonment by her lovers father. I really appreciate your commitment to demonstrating the physical practicality of extremely impractical armour though. It makes for great entertainment. Edit, also Merry Christmas 🎄🎁 I'm happy everything got sorted before the holiday started.
Merry Christmas cmm5542/Bernadette! (Although I DO like your actual name as well.) I'm proudly sitting upright and typing whilst dealing with a cold. Or flu? When your nose stops running while you sleep, which is it? = ) I have not exercised in a couple of days and IT IS unsettling. Hope your holiday with your family is going amazingly well! Seeing the festive sights! Eating your sister's cooking!
Seems like an ideal task for using a jigsaw? They are, after all, meant to cut thin wood (fairly similar-ish to thick cardboard) and follow intricate curves, etc.
Thanks for the video! Keep up the good work! I'll admit that I skip over the ads whenever I can; still, after the Demonetization Saga, I can't help but see their presence as a victory 😊
1:45 I'd guess that was a decision to save on rendering resources. I know it's small but having a bunch of those would add up. Especially the physics elements.
As a one-time member of the SCA who has helped folk with their armor, usually when you have overlapping plates like that there is some form of strapping behind them that ties them all together (in the SCA it is often a leather belt). The attachment points are often hidden under the overlap. The leather strap that the thigh armor hangs from is often hidden and protected by the tasset. Admittedly SCA armor does not have to deal with edged weapons and the possibility of those straps being cut, but I can see a magical fantasy version that can succeed at that.
My late wife was involved in the fringes of the Society for Creative Anachronism and had friends in the Florian Society. Medieval groups in Brisbane. She introduced to a couple of armourers and they showed me what went into just making a mailed glove…. I decided to stick to model kits! Have the greatest respect though.
I am all here for the cardboard and sticky tape armor! I love the visual in-depth breakdown of each piece. Thank you for sharing how you conceptualize the deconstruction reconstruction of what you are seeing. Please make more of these
Thanks for going the extra mile and recreating this piece of armor. That being said, I expect nothing less in every video from hereon out. This and more cheese, obviously.
I don’t know if anyone has mentioned it, but the shape of the pieces look very much like the muscle groups of the thigh! So if that’s the inspiration, they should be held on with ligaments and tendons. Lol.
How it goes on? If you can't "Sailor Moon" it into place, at the very least you should recruit a squire :) Maybe the outer plates are welded together and connect to the cuirass under the tasset? Then the inner plate can be hinged and connect to the outer plate via locking hook? OR, Occam's Razor, the thigh scales are simply worked into metal of the cuisses and aren't actually an underlayment. That still leaves her with a skin-tight scale cod, which sounds about the least comfortable thing to wear in or out of combat
Yeah, you got to be forgiving with video game armor. If they articulated every single panel of armor it would take ages to make the armor sets in a game.
Not really. The amount of technical detail put in the armor in game is generally enough. The biggest problem here is that the skeleton the model is rigged to doesn't have bones for the tassets. Because of that you get the oddity we see in game.
I would love to see you in full cardboard armor! Imagine if you had 10 days to make this video! Total side note, when my wife was teaching Sunday School, I build a full "Armor of God" out of cardboard. The kids had a hoot putting it on
ah yes, the problems of motion capture: the motions captured are sans additional layers, like armor pieces. Aylin's armor is magnificent, but yeah some realism is lost due to the nature of how it was made. Still gorgeous, though!
Okay, I love, absolutely love that you tried out the armor design with cardboard, that was brilliant! It would be a lot of fun for you to take some of those iffy I would wear it armors you've reviewed before and use the cardboard to find ways to make it work.
How much fun will Halloween be for Jill's kids? My dad once made a pirate costume with a real peg leg. People asked how it was so realistic and I said, "We cut my leg off." Granted, that was not the reason my leg was amputated, but it was how the peg leg looked realistic. It was actually a real peg leg.
From a gameplay perspective bg3 not giving them helmets was great, because it pushes the player to think about finding equipment for the companions right from the very start.
I feel like I always learn a lot whenever I watch your videos. It's cool seeing how one of my favorite looking armor pieces in the game holds up to real life standards. Obviously the gaming art form has certain limitations that hinder it's potential but I always like seeing your breakdowns on these kinds of things.
Noticed the little Tardis in the back for the first time, always great to meet a fellow Whovian! Also, can you maybe review a few of the Witcher sets from Witcher 3(and the Kaer Morhen set)?
Most of this is probably in order to save memory since so many animations would make the game run slower. This lack of movement is consistent with the rest of the game since most clothing and hair have limited physics. Also Dame Aylin and her armor are not seen much in game in comparison to other characters(Let me explain). First of all some players might not even see her in her armor(or at all) depending on the route they take(Dark Justiciar Shadowheart, Shadowheart is killed by Lae'zel). Dame Aylin is not animated in her armor that much she has four cut scenes with it on her: transformation sequence, removing the Shadow Cure(Mostly quick shots with lots of sparkles), Dialog after final boss of Act 2 and her reunion with Isobel. She has some dialog at camp but she does not move much and her lower body is not really visible. Because of the top down zoomed out view of combat in the game it is hard to see any details on characters armor so animators don't animate details so space is not wasted on things the player will probably not see(Complicated animations would also diminish clarity). I like Bg3 but the clothing design can be hit or miss. I love your videos and I'm glad your back.
Having spent so many hours with this game as well.. Can you convince me that she's not basically sailor moon? She is the daughter of the moon goddess, has a magical girl transformation sequence, and she fights evil.
It definitely feels like the armors are designed more as separate "skins" for the characters rather than animated "clothing". Which, means they all feel very... "skin tight"....
It looks sprayed on - like what the uniforms were supposed to be in the first Star Trek movie before the physique of the original series actors were examined. Kirk and Scotty would have had skintight bulges. Spock and Bones were still fairly close to their 1960s selves. Sulu would have rocked it. 😁I would have embarrassed myself with my reaction to Uhura. 😳🤯Chekov would have had a console to hide behind but wouldn't have needed it.
Funny is that your problems are the reason I found you back. Years ago I saw a video about a sword in a dress. And didn’t immediately subscribe. But it stayed in my memory. But didn’t know the name of the channel. And now I not only found you, but also discovered that your whole channel is full of stuff I like.
I believe the panels are embossed dyed leather and are integrated enrichment of the scalemail britches. So probably have laces/straps on the back that weave through the scale.
About the only non-magical way I can think off for that thigh section to work and stay together is that the scale mail attaches to edges but not underneath the plate sections, I hope my meaning was clear. As for the cuirass I imagine those blue colored side pieces to be stiff cloth or leather.
Those are some very small scales. It might technically save my life, but I would still be about as afraid of getting hit by stuff wearing that, as just wearing layered fabric or something, because it will do basically nothing to distribute force. Things will break.
For Overlap: I think the base of the armor is the pretty magic scale mail, and that fully covers the legs. The pieces you cut out to demonstrate are attached directly to the underlying base of the scale mail pants. Similar to how a gambeson might have metal plates attached, or Worf's chest decoration has a metal House Crest attached. Or pinning a name tag to a shirt :) Also, I think some of the lines you drew are decorative inlaid lines on the pieces, rather than separations between pieces.
The upper leggy things seem to end up under the knee things. Maybe they're attatched and kept from falling down/apart there? Rivets/something flexible. As a trained mechanic who knows nothing about armour I'm a big fan of screws, since they can be opened and closed many times. So you could even use screws to take the armour off/on. Where the two pieces meet at the hip and connect in a neat line, idk, weld/solder? Or it could be a folded seam. Depending on the type/thickness of the metal. Also could chainmail have holes? Like, wear a (leather/textile) garter under the chainmal, have a little opening in the chainmail so a ring can poke through on which to attatch the leg armour. Or just a strap small enough to fit through the chain links. What confuses me is the long fabric straps down the centre and the sides. Like... that's surely just ornamental and would be taken off in battle? Or is there a purpose other than be a general nuisance to everyone around?
Enjoying the continued critic of real world armor suitability against fantasy armor! For a suggestion, just because it wasn't brought up, find a cosplayer who is no doubt attempting cosplay this exactly armor set / character. I'm sure it would be a very interesting discussion of the melding of fantasy armor design and practical, or impractical, costume construction and wearing of costume. I kind of want a Adam Savage view of how it'd be done now. This engagement comment brought to you by the number remonitization and the letter cheese.
"Magic!" High level character with fancy armour that wouldn't work in a mechanical way, then magic made it work. Also known as, the graphic designers didn't have the time to make it work in a practical sense, so they made it into a skin.
While I am totally invested and entertained by the breakdown of this armor/skinsuit, I do feel like it is worth noting that she doesn't put the armor on, but rather magically materializes the armor onto her body thanks to the power of her mother the moon goddess. That being said, I do appreciate the need to break it down and understand the functionality (or un-functionality) of it regardless of it's lore
I fought in the SCA for years until my health made me stop, and this video really takes me back to the days of cutting cardboard patterns and duct-taping them on to see what worked and what didn't, then making the armor in steel and leather and often finding out that the armor often didn't work as well as the cardboard suggested it might and having to start again. Frustrating and wasteful, and some of my fondest memories.
I think we're at an interesting place in several industries right now. Take superhero costumes. The originals were based on the stretchy spandex suits that strongmen wore in the early 20th century, and that was the fundamental basis for years; essentially stuff painted on a human physique, even if it was the sort of chain/scale mail that Captain America wore under his costume. Armor as texture, in other words. Obviously films and theater and television all handled it from the opposite angle; how to make reality practical. Video games, essentially being a variant on drawing, went the comic book path, especially with the extremely low polygon count that we had until relatively recently. But even games with bleeding edge graphics like Cyberpunk 2077 still use old-school tricks like the "rain box" as a clever hack on reality to avoid having to do something resource-hoggy like trying to render realistic weather physics on a large scale. In that regard, there's now a massive amount of overlap between graphic design for video games and graphic design for special effects. Figure one of the biggest problems with the Bayverse Transformers movies (aside from them unnecessarily trying to animate every micro bit of the robot in every render) was that they ignored mass and weight physics, so the robots, while very realistic LOOKING, didn't MOVE like something their size and weight should move. It's sort of an uncanny valley for movement. I suspect video game designers face something similar; the physics of armor is tricky enough that sometimes you can fudge realistic armor layering, for instance, if the character moves in a way that's believable to the basic design of armor they seem to have.
i think it is all one armor and the bigger peices have tabs with holes in them on the inside so it attaches directly to the scale. there might be a separation between the pants section and cuirass / upper body section. but then i don't have any idea how you would get the upper section on
One possible answer to the structural question is illusion; if some of the seams were either actually seams (permanently joining two plates) or false seams (a single plate with decoration made to look like seams), the structure would be more practical… At risk of disappointing, you could also fill some of the gaps and repuse into the solid plate to make it look like scale… most blows which hit the inner thigh are likely to be rising after all so a directional armour (like scale) is probably not the best choice there.
Some advice for the future; if you want to shape cardboard soak it in 3:1 water and starch, fork it around your mold/ body part, then hit it with a blow dryer.
I was pondering this set last night after DA agreed to join my party. I kind of had to chalk it up some pieces being sewn onto a garment below and others clipping/attaching to that under piece for stability (but not relying on that undergarment to hold them all up, just to hold them in place in relation to the other pieces) Or it is magical moonbeam armour and we all just need to get over ourselves and eat some cheese. Lol
There's a few games out there that have done tassets really well, but like the pinned comment mentions bits like these are always difficult and you have to consider what you're willing to sacrifice for optimization. Usually in games where tassets are rigid physics objects flapping about on straps, they're made to only interact with the legs and phase through everything else, which is frankly good enough and avoids a lot of potential issues.
The thing which leapt out at me was those pauldrons.There are two pauldrons on each side, and the outer set seem only to exist to be knocked off by a downwards strike from an enemy. The top looks to be designed specifically to catch such a strike, and direct it between the two pauldrons so as to separate them.
And our Lady has been loosed from the demonitisation cage, not sure how it happened but now we must make offerings of like, subscribe, notice and comment to appease them. To show I watched the full video, Merry Christmas and CHEESE with Sheogorath jammies.
When you animate a model you create "bones" which are mathematical constructs that the points of the model attach to. The animator then moves the bones to create game animation (sometimes they motion capture it). Creating flappy tassets would require two more bones that need to be animated for every motion of the character. On top of that animation reuse is a thing, so if the devs only paid the animators to make 100 generic animations for all the characters and only a few characters have tassets, there will be no bones data for those tassets. There is the option to mathinaticaly compute where flabby bits go when a model goes through animation (the infamous jiggle physics). However that option often creates animation artifacts where solid objects pass through each other. The tldr of is the decision to not make the tassets flap around properly was made as a result of many technical and financial limitations.😊
Dame Aylin quite literally magical girl transforms herself into the armour so I don't think she needs to worry about how to put pieces on... But a great video nonetheless :D
As a 3D / game designer I do understand the bending issue though.
This will get long, and have a lot of info, but not nearly enough to completely explain it, just to give an idea...
And I ABSOLUTELY understand that the review of an armor from a game has to look at these things as they are, not as they could be. Makes it more interesting to watch, and you learn more about how real armor works, so this is by no means to try and change the view on the armors. Just to explain the design side for people who like to know ;)
If you want armor to be physically correct, you have to design everything separate, and have it animated individually.
Sounds simple, but there are 3 things you NEED to keep as low as possible: 1: textures. More / bigger textures means you need a LOT more RAM. And it stacks up VERY fast. 2: vertices. The "pixels" so to speak, that hold 3D models together. 3D shapes are made up of triangles. The points are called vertex (vertices for multiple). If you have too many of them, it REALLY slows down the system, because it needs to calculate every triangle separately. 3: Physics calculations. These calculations slow down your system a LOT.
If you have more independent pieces, you have to design the model with more "bones" to define how each piece can move. Every piece has its own texture. And since it's a separate shape, the computer has to calculate the triangles of that shape, AND of the model underneath! Sure, it might be invisible, but the computer doesn't know that if it doesn't calculate it. And every extra piece needs its own physics calculations.
And really: designing it accurately is often a LOT easier than designing it optimized for performance.
That's how I imagined it working. Plus all that detail would mainly pay off during movement like combat. And during combat, you are not watching tassets move around.
I suggest to do this more realistically you'd need a way to do an animation efficiently that 'pretends' they are moving. Maybe just a blur, or jiggle. Maybe if you could find another thing already modelled and mirror it?
In FFXIV, this leads to the funny effect that taller shoes make your character's legs shorter. (or more accurately, the shoes are part of the leg and the leg keeps its lenght)
If I may add to that: if each pieces of armor are independent models, they have to be rigged for animators to move properly with the body while also not clip (phase) through each other. The animators are then restricted in their range of motion.
But the catch here is: it's motion captured animation. The actors are in tight mocap suits and are not moving with a huge accurate armor on them. So making the armor a single mesh (skin) that can bend with the body, while still unrealistic, will let the actors motion be transfered to the armor.
On the other end, I think a full physics driven armor would no only be hard to render in real time, but pieces may start clipping or flipping in every directions they can when the tension builds up while actors are moving in directions not physically possible for solid objects.
The way I think about armors in cases like this are that they are "suggesting" what the armor is when you look at it but from a practical standpoint the in game armor will have to bend and mold like a skin. Going for the look without the function in game for all the reason you point out
I do a lot of the same making items in the virtual world "Second Life", and the combination of skeleton and vertices is at the heart of it. And, if you see the mesh of vertices as skin,. and the bones of the skeleton as as rigid, you need extra data to define the effect of the muscles under the skin.. You would have the same to define how a knitted sweater moves. In a game a character might never take off a sweater. In a virtual world you can have several layers which have to work together. "Second Life" also uses textures and vertex meshes of varying level of complexity, to allow for a range of viewing distances.
There is a lot of jargon. And a lot of what happens in games has been a staple of films. Is a director saying, "I want to this" and different? The tools have changed.
The magic of CAD -- Cardboard Aided Design 😁👍
😄😄😄
A cosplayers most valued resource or so I'm told.
#manualCAD, not #autoCAD
i thought it stood for Cardboard And Duct-tape
Bravo 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
1) Experimental armor evaluations make me happy.
2) I’ve seldom been more pleased to see an ad.
3) Merry Christmas
4) Cheese
All hail the cheese!
....
Also merry christmas!
First time I’ve ever been happy to see stupid and annoying ads glaringly interrupt a video. Congratulations on being remonetized!
Loved the armor review. What a delightful christmas present.
I would like to suggest a new tier just below "I'd wear it", called "It's magic!" for armors that look beautiful and you'd wear it but it would require magic to exist and and a transformation cutscene for you to wear it
Second this hehe!
I support the addition of this new category
I appreciate Jill going full Mythbusters on the armor. I would love to see more of this.
10:00 To answer the question: Yes, the armor is very much magical. It gets beamed onto her by goddess magic in a cutscene.
Also, being an Aasimar (she's the daughter of the goddess Selûne) means she has wings. Yay, mobility! Although her leg armor being weird is a funny headcanon explanation as to why she is so prone to falling over in combat. (Pardon the pun XD)
This is objectively correct. Besides she's an immortal so the armor's aesthetics might be more important than their function. edit: she has that priestess girlfriend to impress after all.
the goddess who also is her mom
BDM tss! 😂👏
Came to say exactly this!
As a side note, in D&D there's actually a type of magical armor, called cast-off armor, where its entire gimmick is that it comes off magically. Point being; The idea of armor that is designed to be taken off and put on magically isn't unique to Baldur's gate.
Obviously, having armor that you don't have to worry about 'putting on,' and that you could just have on whenever you need it, allows for some very unique designs that would probably be even more effective than real armor.
@Necroes Cast-off armor: "For when you want to give your players magical armor but don't want to deal with the 23 AC Warforged Paladin."
Or someone wants to play a literal heavy metal magical girl. 💫
I feel like some of the bendy armour is due to engine limitations. Separately animating every last fold and bit is extremely taxing.
True - but they were animating individual hairs in Shrek in 2001. I have to figure 20 years on, it should be doable if the programmers or the engine is up to it. The graphics card manufacturers' marketing departments keep insisting their hardware is capable.
@@ssgtmole8610 The main difference is Shrek is a film and Baldur's Gate 3 is a game. That means it is more limited as it has to animate everything in real time, even if it was made 20 years later.
@@ssgtmole8610 You confuse movie rendering with gaming rendering, Shrek was not rendered in real time, not even close. Film level renders are really time consuming( or require truly massive computing power( often both)). Plus with Shrek if something rendered goofy, they threw out the footage and tried again. It's the classic situation of Fast, high quality, and affordable. You can make it fast and high-quality, but then it'll only run on hardware that no end user would have . Or fast and runs on a reasonable hw spec, but then quality suffers , or high quality and runs on realistic hardware - in that case you are either doing pretenders video, or willing to live with horribly low FPS.
As tech improves, and software gets better, and people get smarter at hiding the janky bits it gets better, but it's going to be a while before it gets there
@@ssgtmole8610 Oh, it's doable, but is it worth it? Or, rather, can player computers support it? Mega gamers perhaps, but the broader game playing base is more questionable. And even if a computer can physically handle the graphics, how much will it slow down the game and hinder smooth play?
Shrek was one movie. Get it all animated and then everyone sees the same thing. Like a cut scene in a game. But for game play it's a whole extra level of work and system taxation.
@@ssgtmole8610all movies are pre-rendered and can spend seconds to even minutes per frame. Games need many frames in a second.
Why I absolutely love it, animating different armor pieces moving without it being just a clipping mess is hard (you might be thinking you've seen clipping mess and it was ok, but no, you've seen good enough non clipping mess).
Which is why you get so many breastplates expanding and contracting with just the idle's breathing.
And yes, that armor is put on with moon magic. It just shows up on her.
I think the magic user should watch out for the Squire's Union. Labor action may be called for. 😂
Basicly the disconnect of design and craft. As a tailor i see designes all the time that look stunning but cant be done as depicted. We learn how to interpret it and make the closest to the design but that only really works when design and technical teams communicate. In a Videogame you can get away with the raw design, only when someone looks with a technical eye on it does it fall apart
This! I've been trying to make a cosplay for a video game character but so many things just simply are not possible in real life!
I'm a simple woman, I see a Jill video, I must support for the cheese gods demand it. However I would happily watch many more videos of Jill does cardboard armor demo, this was really fun and thought provoking for me as someone who has taken the time and is still learning to smith armor.
ALL HAIL OUR CHEESE OVERLORDS! MERRY SWISS-MAS!
Hell yeah, the armour reviews remain my favourite of your videos. Whether it is one with several armours or one like this. Both are nice
No idea who the character is or anything but seeing you make it from cardboard made me very happy…as did the ads, which I watched in full 💕💕💕
Hearing cuirass pronounced as "kweeras" made me realize that I have never actually heard that word spoken aloud before 😅
And even then, I've heard people out lout say 'cure-ess' as well.
From the older alternate spelling "Qurious"
Love this video! The fun and whimsey of just getting down and contructing something out of cardboard to wrap your mind around it is just hilarious! Videos like this is what makees your channele special!
I love that there is background music from the game continuing while she's working/assembling. Chef' kiss.
I noticed that too! 'Down by the river' 😄
Regarding the tassels, that's a limitation of the game engine. Your starting point is to animate someone in pants and shirt moving their limbs with the clothes moving very plastically. Then you ask whether it's worth adding support for free flowing bits. There's so much shit to build that mid-budget isometric games which BG3 is will say "no". Which doesn't stop the artists from painting free flowing bits but the accepted convention is to pretend they are free flowing
Heres how i interpret that armour:
It's a big padded catsuit. The scales are stretched into it, as normal, but the large plate appliques have metal loops on the inside and cloth straps, where scales would be, stitch the plate segments to the catsuit, like overgrown scales. The front plate segment and blue ribbon hide the buttons where she squeezes into the suit every morning for at least 3 hours.
I'd like it to be considered that Dame Aylin can fly thus changing her needs for mobility in the legs, she really only needs her legs to be able to move in actions that assist her sword fighting and therefore could probably have rather structured leg armour. I'm not saying the armour design is done acknowledging this but rather as a thought for how a winged assimar would have different requirements.
When I was an apprentice, we were taught "Straight blades for curved lines and curved blades for straight lines." It might come in handy in future Cardboard Aided Design videos.
It is magic armour that her moon goddess mother beams directly onto her in a kind of magic girl anime cutscene when she's released from 100 years of imprisonment by her lovers father. I really appreciate your commitment to demonstrating the physical practicality of extremely impractical armour though. It makes for great entertainment.
Edit, also Merry Christmas 🎄🎁 I'm happy everything got sorted before the holiday started.
Great to have armour reviews again! 🎉
Merry Christmas, everyone! 💞
Merry Christmas cmm5542/Bernadette! (Although I DO like your actual name as well.) I'm proudly sitting upright and typing whilst dealing with a cold. Or flu? When your nose stops running while you sleep, which is it? = ) I have not exercised in a couple of days and IT IS unsettling. Hope your holiday with your family is going amazingly well! Seeing the festive sights! Eating your sister's cooking!
@@classicsloverI am! Sorry for your cold; get well soon and have a Merry Christmas! 😊
@@classicsloverI am! Sorry for your cold; get well soon and have a Merry Christmas! 😊
@@classicsloverI am! Sorry for your cold; get well soon and Merry Christmas! 😊
@@classicsloverI am! Sorry for your cold; get well soon and Merry Christmas! 😊
4:50 as someone who likes to work with cardboard occasionally, I love seeing you try to cut it. I see you have mastered it about as well as I.
Seems like an ideal task for using a jigsaw? They are, after all, meant to cut thin wood (fairly similar-ish to thick cardboard) and follow intricate curves, etc.
@jaelwyn sounds good
Thanks for the video! Keep up the good work! I'll admit that I skip over the ads whenever I can; still, after the Demonetization Saga, I can't help but see their presence as a victory 😊
Yea Jill back with adverts - happy new year and have a very happy Christmas and thank you for all your videos
1:45 I'd guess that was a decision to save on rendering resources.
I know it's small but having a bunch of those would add up. Especially the physics elements.
As a one-time member of the SCA who has helped folk with their armor, usually when you have overlapping plates like that there is some form of strapping behind them that ties them all together (in the SCA it is often a leather belt). The attachment points are often hidden under the overlap. The leather strap that the thigh armor hangs from is often hidden and protected by the tasset. Admittedly SCA armor does not have to deal with edged weapons and the possibility of those straps being cut, but I can see a magical fantasy version that can succeed at that.
My late wife was involved in the fringes of the Society for Creative Anachronism and had friends in the Florian Society. Medieval groups in Brisbane.
She introduced to a couple of armourers and they showed me what went into just making a mailed glove…. I decided to stick to model kits!
Have the greatest respect though.
The remonetization is at hand! I love Dame Aylin's armor and just basically everything about her. Thanks for giving her weird magic thigh armor a go 😂
Welcome back, glad everything got sorted, always a delight to see another armour review!
Glad to see youve got the Adsense schenanigans sorted out.
👍👍👍👍😎😎😎😎
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you.
🎄🎄🎁🎁🎄🎄🎊🥳🥳🎊
I am all here for the cardboard and sticky tape armor! I love the visual in-depth breakdown of each piece. Thank you for sharing how you conceptualize the deconstruction reconstruction of what you are seeing. Please make more of these
Thanks for going the extra mile and recreating this piece of armor. That being said, I expect nothing less in every video from hereon out. This and more cheese, obviously.
Armor craft time with Jill! I love it 😄
Merry Christmas and happy new year, Jill! So glad to see you back. 😊
And the scale goes...all...the way under. You'd think that would be uncomfortable all bunched up in your bits. And the Christmas socks are amazing!
I don’t know if anyone has mentioned it, but the shape of the pieces look very much like the muscle groups of the thigh! So if that’s the inspiration, they should be held on with ligaments and tendons. Lol.
Well Jill, cardboard armour and cardboard weapons may be fun...but we should all avoid having a cardboard horse. Fording rivers would be unpleasant.
How it goes on? If you can't "Sailor Moon" it into place, at the very least you should recruit a squire :)
Maybe the outer plates are welded together and connect to the cuirass under the tasset? Then the inner plate can be hinged and connect to the outer plate via locking hook?
OR, Occam's Razor, the thigh scales are simply worked into metal of the cuisses and aren't actually an underlayment. That still leaves her with a skin-tight scale cod, which sounds about the least comfortable thing to wear in or out of combat
Yeah, you got to be forgiving with video game armor. If they articulated every single panel of armor it would take ages to make the armor sets in a game.
Not really. The amount of technical detail put in the armor in game is generally enough. The biggest problem here is that the skeleton the model is rigged to doesn't have bones for the tassets. Because of that you get the oddity we see in game.
I would love to see you in full cardboard armor! Imagine if you had 10 days to make this video!
Total side note, when my wife was teaching Sunday School, I build a full "Armor of God" out of cardboard. The kids had a hoot putting it on
Maybe a NerdForge collab? Well, there's an idea...
Awww yeah! An Armour of God is classic! Nice work!
Seconding "never been so glad", or relieved, to see an ad.
Congratulations 🎉
And cheese 🧀
Perhaps for breakfast 🙂
Merry Christmas Jill! May Father Christmas bring you the cheese of your dreams
ah yes, the problems of motion capture: the motions captured are sans additional layers, like armor pieces. Aylin's armor is magnificent, but yeah some realism is lost due to the nature of how it was made. Still gorgeous, though!
Okay, I love, absolutely love that you tried out the armor design with cardboard, that was brilliant! It would be a lot of fun for you to take some of those iffy I would wear it armors you've reviewed before and use the cardboard to find ways to make it work.
How much fun will Halloween be for Jill's kids?
My dad once made a pirate costume with a real peg leg. People asked how it was so realistic and I said, "We cut my leg off."
Granted, that was not the reason my leg was amputated, but it was how the peg leg looked realistic. It was actually a real peg leg.
From a gameplay perspective bg3 not giving them helmets was great, because it pushes the player to think about finding equipment for the companions right from the very start.
Informative and entertaining.
Delightful as always.
As are those fabulous socks.
I feel like I always learn a lot whenever I watch your videos. It's cool seeing how one of my favorite looking armor pieces in the game holds up to real life standards. Obviously the gaming art form has certain limitations that hinder it's potential but I always like seeing your breakdowns on these kinds of things.
time to get into EVA foam cosplay armour builds...
Noticed the little Tardis in the back for the first time, always great to meet a fellow Whovian! Also, can you maybe review a few of the Witcher sets from Witcher 3(and the Kaer Morhen set)?
I wonder if there is any armor in Doctor Who that is worth analyzing? 🤔
@KlingonCaptain Ice Warriors maybe.
Sontaran armor, Cybermen, Daleks...
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. This was a wonderful virtual present. Thank you.
Yay. Back to the business of armor reviews.
Your christmas socks are quite nice, well chosen.
I am so glad you are back! I loved your test of corset armor.
Most of this is probably in order to save memory since so many animations would make the game run slower. This lack of movement is consistent with the rest of the game since most clothing and hair have limited physics. Also Dame Aylin and her armor are not seen much in game in comparison to other characters(Let me explain). First of all some players might not even see her in her armor(or at all) depending on the route they take(Dark Justiciar Shadowheart, Shadowheart is killed by Lae'zel). Dame Aylin is not animated in her armor that much she has four cut scenes with it on her: transformation sequence, removing the Shadow Cure(Mostly quick shots with lots of sparkles), Dialog after final boss of Act 2 and her reunion with Isobel. She has some dialog at camp but she does not move much and her lower body is not really visible. Because of the top down zoomed out view of combat in the game it is hard to see any details on characters armor so animators don't animate details so space is not wasted on things the player will probably not see(Complicated animations would also diminish clarity). I like Bg3 but the clothing design can be hit or miss. I love your videos and I'm glad your back.
Having spent so many hours with this game as well.. Can you convince me that she's not basically sailor moon? She is the daughter of the moon goddess, has a magical girl transformation sequence, and she fights evil.
@@Avrysatos I can't convince you that she is not basically Sailor Moon because she very much is basically Sailor Moon.
Magic Girl Sailor Moon Scout, sure, but no meatball hair, no Sailor Moon, proper. 🍝
It definitely feels like the armors are designed more as separate "skins" for the characters rather than animated "clothing". Which, means they all feel very... "skin tight"....
It looks sprayed on - like what the uniforms were supposed to be in the first Star Trek movie before the physique of the original series actors were examined. Kirk and Scotty would have had skintight bulges. Spock and Bones were still fairly close to their 1960s selves. Sulu would have rocked it. 😁I would have embarrassed myself with my reaction to Uhura. 😳🤯Chekov would have had a console to hide behind but wouldn't have needed it.
Funny is that your problems are the reason I found you back.
Years ago I saw a video about a sword in a dress. And didn’t immediately subscribe. But it stayed in my memory. But didn’t know the name of the channel. And now I not only found you, but also discovered that your whole channel is full of stuff I like.
Good thing you're back with your both interesting and fun content. 👍
I believe the panels are embossed dyed leather and are integrated enrichment of the scalemail britches. So probably have laces/straps on the back that weave through the scale.
Merry Christmas, everyone! It was lovely to see your armour review! It's interesting to see 😃
About the only non-magical way I can think off for that thigh section to work and stay together is that the scale mail attaches to edges but not underneath the plate sections, I hope my meaning was clear.
As for the cuirass I imagine those blue colored side pieces to be stiff cloth or leather.
Your Xmas socks are amazing! Thank you very much 🥸
Not the point of the video but I really like the way you did your hair in this video ☺️ and the colour of the shirt is really nice, too.
Those are some very small scales. It might technically save my life, but I would still be about as afraid of getting hit by stuff wearing that, as just wearing layered fabric or something, because it will do basically nothing to distribute force. Things will break.
For Overlap:
I think the base of the armor is the pretty magic scale mail, and that fully covers the legs.
The pieces you cut out to demonstrate are attached directly to the underlying base of the scale mail pants.
Similar to how a gambeson might have metal plates attached, or Worf's chest decoration has a metal House Crest attached.
Or pinning a name tag to a shirt :)
Also, I think some of the lines you drew are decorative inlaid lines on the pieces, rather than separations between pieces.
Merry Cristmas Jill! Thanks for a surprisingly detailed review. I was not expecting you to break out the cardboard for this one! 🎄🤗
This armor does not need to make sense in real world physics, but I absolutely love the discussion of "ok but what if?" Top notch work.
Merry Christmas. 🎉I hope you can weave the demonetization into book two.❤
So fun! I haven't made armor pieces out of cardboard since I was in 3rd grade!
Happy Christmas!
Congratulations on being re-monetized!
That armor has to be magic: it's skintight!
Cheese!
The upper leggy things seem to end up under the knee things. Maybe they're attatched and kept from falling down/apart there? Rivets/something flexible. As a trained mechanic who knows nothing about armour I'm a big fan of screws, since they can be opened and closed many times. So you could even use screws to take the armour off/on. Where the two pieces meet at the hip and connect in a neat line, idk, weld/solder? Or it could be a folded seam. Depending on the type/thickness of the metal.
Also could chainmail have holes? Like, wear a (leather/textile) garter under the chainmal, have a little opening in the chainmail so a ring can poke through on which to attatch the leg armour. Or just a strap small enough to fit through the chain links.
What confuses me is the long fabric straps down the centre and the sides. Like... that's surely just ornamental and would be taken off in battle? Or is there a purpose other than be a general nuisance to everyone around?
Enjoying the continued critic of real world armor suitability against fantasy armor!
For a suggestion, just because it wasn't brought up, find a cosplayer who is no doubt attempting cosplay this exactly armor set / character. I'm sure it would be a very interesting discussion of the melding of fantasy armor design and practical, or impractical, costume construction and wearing of costume. I kind of want a Adam Savage view of how it'd be done now.
This engagement comment brought to you by the number remonitization and the letter cheese.
"Magic!"
High level character with fancy armour that wouldn't work in a mechanical way, then magic made it work. Also known as, the graphic designers didn't have the time to make it work in a practical sense, so they made it into a skin.
lol I’ve been stuck in this game since I bought it 2 weeks ago. Probably one of 5 best video games I’ve played since 1993.
Commenting for the algorithm ! Happy holidays to all. Love the cardboard !
Merry Christmas, Jill. 🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄
Merry Christmas Jill. Thanks for all your videos
Good to see you doing what you do best. Happy Christmas to you and yours!
While I am totally invested and entertained by the breakdown of this armor/skinsuit, I do feel like it is worth noting that she doesn't put the armor on, but rather magically materializes the armor onto her body thanks to the power of her mother the moon goddess. That being said, I do appreciate the need to break it down and understand the functionality (or un-functionality) of it regardless of it's lore
I fought in the SCA for years until my health made me stop, and this video really takes me back to the days of cutting cardboard patterns and duct-taping them on to see what worked and what didn't, then making the armor in steel and leather and often finding out that the armor often didn't work as well as the cardboard suggested it might and having to start again. Frustrating and wasteful, and some of my fondest memories.
In two years when Jill is full- time cosplaying, we will look back at this video as the start of it all.
Merry Christmas!
I think we're at an interesting place in several industries right now.
Take superhero costumes. The originals were based on the stretchy spandex suits that strongmen wore in the early 20th century, and that was the fundamental basis for years; essentially stuff painted on a human physique, even if it was the sort of chain/scale mail that Captain America wore under his costume. Armor as texture, in other words.
Obviously films and theater and television all handled it from the opposite angle; how to make reality practical.
Video games, essentially being a variant on drawing, went the comic book path, especially with the extremely low polygon count that we had until relatively recently. But even games with bleeding edge graphics like Cyberpunk 2077 still use old-school tricks like the "rain box" as a clever hack on reality to avoid having to do something resource-hoggy like trying to render realistic weather physics on a large scale.
In that regard, there's now a massive amount of overlap between graphic design for video games and graphic design for special effects. Figure one of the biggest problems with the Bayverse Transformers movies (aside from them unnecessarily trying to animate every micro bit of the robot in every render) was that they ignored mass and weight physics, so the robots, while very realistic LOOKING, didn't MOVE like something their size and weight should move. It's sort of an uncanny valley for movement.
I suspect video game designers face something similar; the physics of armor is tricky enough that sometimes you can fudge realistic armor layering, for instance, if the character moves in a way that's believable to the basic design of armor they seem to have.
Merry Christmas to you, Ursa Minor and Nemo
i think it is all one armor and the bigger peices have tabs with holes in them on the inside so it attaches directly to the scale. there might be a separation between the pants section and cuirass / upper body section. but then i don't have any idea how you would get the upper section on
Merry Christmas and welcome back.
You just put ten times more thought into the design of her armor than the game developers did.
One possible answer to the structural question is illusion; if some of the seams were either actually seams (permanently joining two plates) or false seams (a single plate with decoration made to look like seams), the structure would be more practical…
At risk of disappointing, you could also fill some of the gaps and repuse into the solid plate to make it look like scale… most blows which hit the inner thigh are likely to be rising after all so a directional armour (like scale) is probably not the best choice there.
Have a Happy relaxing Christmas. See you in the New Year 😊🎄🎁🎊
Some advice for the future; if you want to shape cardboard soak it in 3:1 water and starch, fork it around your mold/ body part, then hit it with a blow dryer.
I was about to ask what your ideal armour would look like, but perhaps that's what you have coming up soon?
Merry Christmas and never change!
Merry Christmas to you and yours, Jill!
I was pondering this set last night after DA agreed to join my party. I kind of had to chalk it up some pieces being sewn onto a garment below and others clipping/attaching to that under piece for stability (but not relying on that undergarment to hold them all up, just to hold them in place in relation to the other pieces)
Or it is magical moonbeam armour and we all just need to get over ourselves and eat some cheese. Lol
There's a few games out there that have done tassets really well, but like the pinned comment mentions bits like these are always difficult and you have to consider what you're willing to sacrifice for optimization. Usually in games where tassets are rigid physics objects flapping about on straps, they're made to only interact with the legs and phase through everything else, which is frankly good enough and avoids a lot of potential issues.
The thing which leapt out at me was those pauldrons.There are two pauldrons on each side, and the outer set seem only to exist to be knocked off by a downwards strike from an enemy. The top looks to be designed specifically to catch such a strike, and direct it between the two pauldrons so as to separate them.
And our Lady has been loosed from the demonitisation cage, not sure how it happened but now we must make offerings of like, subscribe, notice and comment to appease them. To show I watched the full video, Merry Christmas and CHEESE with Sheogorath jammies.
When you animate a model you create "bones" which are mathematical constructs that the points of the model attach to. The animator then moves the bones to create game animation (sometimes they motion capture it). Creating flappy tassets would require two more bones that need to be animated for every motion of the character. On top of that animation reuse is a thing, so if the devs only paid the animators to make 100 generic animations for all the characters and only a few characters have tassets, there will be no bones data for those tassets. There is the option to mathinaticaly compute where flabby bits go when a model goes through animation (the infamous jiggle physics). However that option often creates animation artifacts where solid objects pass through each other. The tldr of is the decision to not make the tassets flap around properly was made as a result of many technical and financial limitations.😊
Dame Aylin quite literally magical girl transforms herself into the armour so I don't think she needs to worry about how to put pieces on... But a great video nonetheless :D
A Jill Christmas armor video with adverts. And socks! Hazzah!
Dame Aylin's armor....looks awesome. Which gamewise was its purpose, I suppose. But I see your reality points.