This is an original design that tries to bridge the gap between the Batsuits from Batman: Arkham Origins and Batman: Arkham Asylum with a lot of extra fluff of my own as usual. As I have already done a more extensive breakdown of this design when I released it as a mod for Batman: Arkham Knight I’ll recap or repeat a lot of passages from that here, so if you read that breakdown you’ll find a lot of familiar things here.
One of my primary concerns when designing this suit was to make every element feel practical and like it has some purpose, rather than just being there to look good and I think it reflects in the following, rather extensive breakdown and speaking of the design, in this case I’ve actually drawn the entire suit design beforehand and managed to adapt it almost perfectly, which is something that I am especially proud on.
As the Origins suit is a distinctly bulky, segmented design I took that as the baseline and integrated it with an armour pattern that’s closer to the Asylum suit while still keeping it split into multiple layers. The undersuit layer is pretty similar to the Asylum suit, with it being some kind of quilted leather or synthetic material that has been segmented by various seams. The next layer ontop of that is a somewhat softer and more flexible type of armour, with a very different look from the undersuit to give it some depth and stronger, visible segmentation. That layer is visible around the external oblique muscles on his torso (left and right of the abdominal muscles) and flows with the direction of those muscles. The third layer is the prominent and rather thick solid plating, which covers chest, abdomen as well as the area of the lateralis muscle on the legs in addition to being present as shoulder and upper arm plating. In keeping with the origins style some of those plates are being connected by straps made of a carbon-fiber-esque material and also sometimes riveted onto each other. I’ve also tried to give the materials of the different layers some unique looks, with the hard plating having a shinier look with a subtle hex-pattern fused onto them while the softer layers are more of a high-tech, flexible yet durable type of fabric.
I’ve followed a similar, more logical approach with the gauntlets as well as those are also quite different from the Arkham Asylum ones. Most notably I’ve deviated quite a lot when it comes to the hand and wrist sections, as I went for a more practical glove design that’s not too dissimilar from the gloves that I made for my Batman Begins model. The idea behind that glove design is somewhat inspired by short gloves that are commonly recommended to be worn for weight-lifting. Those usually cover and reduce stress on your wrist area, which seems like something you’d very much want if you were in Batman’s place. In addition to that I’ve shortened the gauntlet plating so that it no longer covers the wrists, which means Batman won’t break or rather split his wrists apart when trying to support himself on his palms. Having some thick solid plating covering the back of your hands really doesn’t make sense when you think about it and it’s been a pet-peeve of mine with the Arkham Suits for a while. As you can probably see I’ve basically lifted the shape of the gauntlet blades from Arkham Origins, so that the gauntlets have some elements from it as well. In order to give the gauntlets a more “real” look I’ve also added a semi-procedural wear-and-tear implementation to my materials for it, which is basically just based on a curvature map and some noise and a lot of spider-like layering of that into the rest of the shader to get the look I wanted.
The next highlight is the cowl, which somewhat of a segmented and more practical version of the Asylum cowl with some elements and shapes from the Origins cowl added into the mix. I really wanted to make it something that takes cues from both Arkham suits while being practical and matching the rest of the suit and I think that worked out well. It’s also split into multiple layers as you can see, with a solid armour piece covering the clavicles, a slightly more flexible inner piece that wraps around his neck and terminates ontop of the cape and of course a flexible undersuit layer beneath all that, which allows him to freely move his neck. The actual head part of the cowl is closer to the Arkham Asylum cowl, with some details and shape adjustments inspired by the Origins cowl, as seen in the shorter ears and the more prominent highlighting where his actual ears are.
My idea for the cape was that it is something of an early development version of the v8 cape, so it is also segmented into two materials and has a rather distinctive and large gliding shape, which may not be anything like the asylum and origins suit, but I wanted to make something unique and interesting there.
The belt is another highlight as I’ve been spending quite some time on it until I finally came up with a good design. It takes aspects from Asylum, City and Origins and combines them into something that I think turned out very nice. It has large pouches that are inspired by the Arkham City suit, additional smaller pouches that are more like the Asylum suit’s pouches in terms of volume and a capsule similar to the Origins belt. It also a very unique quality thanks to actual physical gadgets being attached to it in the shape of a Batarang holder and a Batclaw-rump, as the latter seems to be some modular piece he uses to modify or make gadgets on-the-fly as seen in Arkham City with the remote electrical charge, so bringing a spare seems reasonable. If you look close enough you might realise that the gadgets aren’t actually to scale, but if I did that they would be ginormous on the belt and that wouldn’t look great as you can imagine. The materials on the belt were also a bit more challenging than usual, since it has quite a few different types of surfaces such as the reinforced fabric of the pouches with metal accents or the metallic bronze parts of the buckle and so on. Nonetheless I am very happy with the resulting look, even if it took quite a lot of tinkering to get there.
An addition that I did a few weeks after finishing this suit was its face model, as I was still trying to learn how to do faces when I originally made the rest of this model. With the face I’ve tried to blend aspects of all the different Arkham Batman faces, but with a stronger slant towards the look of the Origins and especially the Asylum face.
