This suit is essentially a continuation of my series of Suits based on the style of the Arkham version of Batman, this time a reinvention of the Armoured Suits as seen in Arkham Asylum and the WiiU version of Arkham City. The original suit designs never felt quite right to me so I figured that I should take a shot at making my own version based off the concept of a highly armoured suit in that kind of style.
I’ve obviously also kept some continuity with my other Arkham Suits, especially my Proto-Asylum suit for obvious reasons, since it’s just nicer to make it part of that family of batsuit models that I’ve made. If you’re already familiar with those suit designs you’ll recognise quite a few familiar elements, such as the separated cowl and collar, with the collar section itself being segmented and layered in a manner that’s very similar to my Proto-Asylum suit, with a bit of a twist on the back section of the collar to resemble the original Arkham Asylum armoured batsuit design.
The body armour has much less resemblance to the original armoured suit designs from Asylum and City, as both of those have a lot of strange design choices if you ask me, aside from generally feeling a bit overdesigned, so I’ve come up with a layered armour plating design in a similar vein as my previous designs.
We’re once again starting with a simple and flexible undersuit layer, with the idea of that being that it provides some basic protection across Batman’s entire body, but is lightweight and flexible enough to not be a hindrance or burden. A second, more robust and rigid layer comes on top of that, which also serves as the layer that the actual solid metal plating is mounted onto. I’ve varied this approach a bit on his trunks, since I wanted to preserve some of the design elements from the armoured Asylum suit there, with the plating mounting onto the trunks, which themselves already serve as a more reinforced piece of body armour, and a prominent crotch guard going on top. All of that results in a modular and fairly flexible type of body armour, albeit much more reinforced and heavier than it’d be on my other suit designs, thanks to the prominent and thick metal plating.
The gauntlets also follow that kind of modular approach, with them pretty much just being the same gauntlets as on the Asylum suit, but with additional modules added to them, such as a reinforced wrist section and a “kinetic charge” module that sits on top of the main plating of the gauntlets. The latter is pretty much just my way of coming up with a more practical pendant to the elevated glowing components on the armoured Asylum suit’s gauntlets, especially one that wouldn’t be a nightmare when trying to deflect sharp objects such as knives.
I’ve done similar, modular reinforcements on the boots, more specifically through the addition of a large knee-protection section, which fits the overall idea of this suit being tougher and more heavily armoured than the others.
Another highlight is the belt on this suit, as it’s pretty much the “fullest” configuration of the modular Arkham Asylum style belt that I’ve made for my remakes of the original Arkham Asylum and City suits. That means that we have both large and small pouches, the Arkham Origins style vial, the batarang holder as well as the batclaw rump and in addition to that four large capsules next to the buckle on this belt, the latter being intended to hold any kind of volatile chemicals to use in combat situations and whatnot. The sheer amount of individual elements actually made it a bit of a challenge to pack it all into a single UV space (as that’s just a convenient thing to do), but I think it was worth the effort, as the belt has a properly practical appearance as if its stacked with gear.
Another, more unique, detail would also be the fact that the undersuit has a handful of “conduits” that add to the idea of it having some kind of inbuilt kinetic charge-up functionality. Those are visible on both his torso and his arms and connect all the way to the gauntlets. My idea behind this was something akin to the kinetic-energy ability seen with Marvel’s Black Panther, as that just felt very fitting for the idea of this suit design. Those conduits light up when the suit is charged up and consequently also power down when the stored energy is depleted.
I’ve also done a lot of tinkering with getting some nice on-the-fly bone controllers for the shoulderpads working, but for obvious reasons that is somewhat difficult to show with images and rather something you’d really notice in motion.
Last but not least, I’ve spent quite a bit of time on getting the cape right for this suit, as I wanted to capture the rather iconic look that I managed to achieve on the Proto-Asylum suit’s cape, but I also wanted to give it a few unique elements to set it apart and to bring it in line with the more armoured look of this suit. That resulted in this cape being segmented into two layers yet again, with the top half of the cape being reinforced quite noticeable (something akin to the bulletproof cape of Keaton’s Batman perhaps), whereas the bottom half is again made of a lighter fabric that’s more geared to the parachute-like capabilities Batman’s cape often has. I’ve given the lower half two additional rows of reinforcement/boning to really bring out the layered approach, where the upper half only connects to the more structurally essential boning of the cape, whereas the softer lower fabric has some additional reinforcements to make it keep its shape in all kinds of situations.
I’m quite happy with how the suit design worked out from start to finish, although some elements definitely needed a bit of tinkering to get right.
