'Jeanne' - Hands

This may disturb some people, but I'm actually kind of proud of how the gauntlet has turned out so far. Me. Proud of something. It's a strange feeling.

I struggled with this piece for a long time. Originally I was modeling the bracer and the gauntlet as separate pieces, starting with the brace, and simply couldn't get it to work. The curve motif just fell apart as I tried curving it more in a third dimension.

So I went back to the drawing board. I found myself a dozen some odd new photo references of physical gauntlets I liked the look of, reread some things on how they're manufactured, and settled on this new approach. I've modified the curve motif for this piece in two places. The more obvious place is in the top of the hand, where I've done away with the central line and moved the origins of each curve away from each other and rotated them inwards so they come together in the wrist and then separate outwards again.

I've also experimented with the 'wing' variation I mentioned in my post on the legs on the thumb, as seen here. I didn't like how the regular motif looked like it would catch on the dorsal plate of the gauntlet itself when rotating, and this looks like it would move much more smoothly. Obviously I still need to model a special hinge that connects the two plates, but it's proven a bit wonky to make given that the plate over the knuckle actual dips under the plate on the back of the hand. Worst case scenario I just remove the rivet on the dorsal plate and add another to thumb plate and not have them connected to one another at all.

I initially had a lot more rivets on the model securing the plates on the fingers to the underlying glove, but that proved to be too busy looking and rather ugly, so I removed them and those pieces are now held in place by ~Computer Magic~.

Most of the feedback I've gotten so far has been that the wrist is slightly too thin. I think I'm going to leave it as is, though. I presented the gauntlet in isolation without mentioning my goals or the rest of the armor in those instances, and I think the thinness helps with the whole "How do I make a suit of plate mail that is feminine without being sexist?" thing.

Unfortunately, I'm running into some problems with how the gauntlet interacts with the armor over the elbow, as it looks like they would catch on each other constantly. Haven't come up with many ideas for solving it so far, but I've only put about an hour into the elbow total. Mostly they consist of removing the uppermost lame of the gauntlet and leaving more of a gap between the two pieces, removing the elbow piece entirely (I'm surprised at how many examples I've seen of that, although all of them are in art and none in actual physical pieces), or just letting them clip through each other in the final product. I think the last option is how Bioware dealt with similar problems in Dragon Age, so I've at least seen some precedent for cutting that particular corner by people who are a lot better than me at this. Any way I go with it though, it's my fault for not doing the proper preproduction, so lesson kind of learned.

I'm not worried about the problem replicating itself with armor on the upper arm, as I'm trying to keep almost all of the suit's pointy bits pointed upwards towards the head and the plates there should be pretty flush with the underlying arm.