Proto-Asylum Skin Pack v1.0 (Arkham Knight Mod)

Hey folks,

I’ve made some original suit designs for a change, this time something that’s more of an in-universe prototype of the Arkham Asylum Suit, so its somewhere between Arkham Origins and Asylum in terms of design. I also had the spontaneous idea of doing an emergency deployment version while I was at it, since I thought that it’d be nice to have a slightly different design based on the same underlying logic and principles of the Arkham Asylum/City suits, which are also technically emergency deployment versions as far as the story background is concerned. I’ve spent quite some time on making sure that most of the suits design aspects actually make some sense so I’ll also be explaining some of my ideas behind the designs. If you’re not interested in that type of in-depth explanation you may scroll down to the downloads, but it’d be nice if you took some time to understand my thought process and the work involved in all the details that make up these skins :)

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Proto-Asylum Suit

This is the suit that I initially designed and planned to make a while ago. My general idea behind it was to come up with something that blends aspects of both the Arkham Origins and the Arkham Asylum suits into a single design, with a generous touch of my own as always.

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 and split the suit into multiple layers. The undersuit layer is pretty similar to what the Asylum suit looks like, with it being some kind of quilted leather or synthetic material with some segmentation through 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 segmentation. That layer is visible around where the external oblique muscles on his torso are (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 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 Skin. 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 cover 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.

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 edges around 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.

Last but not least, the belt is another highlight as I’ve been spending quite some thought 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, trust me I’ve tried lol.

I think that the suit turned out even better than I expected and I am quite proud on managing to adapt my original concept art of it almost one-to-one. I hope that you like it as much as I do :)

Prototype Emergency Deployment Suit

This variation of the suit was more of a random idea that I had, which felt like a nice addition for those who want something that’s a bit more like the traditional Arkham suits but with some modern and practical aspects. It was also somewhat easier to make since I could reuse some parts of the regular version or rearrange them in a different configuration like I did with the belt, boots and gauntlets.

In order for it to feel more lightweight than the Proto-Asylum Suit I’ve stripped it back to two armour layers, with a very simple fabric undersuit and one layer of soft plating made of a quilted material similar to the original Arkham Suits. The different materials and plating types also meant that the suit has to be a bit leaner than the Proto-Asylum suit so I took some inspiration from the body shape of the City suit from the cinematic trailer made by Blur Studios there, as their model is built less of an Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime compared to the actual in-game versions of the Asylum and City suits.

I’ve also adjusted the cowl a bit, which is still split but with the collar section resembling the Asylum suit a bit more, especially from the back. I still wanted to keep some layered aspects there, so it still has a separate clavicle, inner and undersuit layer but the inner layer is now only present at the front and also serves more as a mounting point for the cape.

Speaking of the cape, I’ve made it more similar to the capes of the Asylum and Origins suit, hence why it is again made of a single piece of fabric and has a more classic Arkham shape, but its gliding state is of course still quite a bit larger than that of the average vanilla Arkham skin.

Overall this suit turned out very nice as well and it really looks like it belongs to the regular Proto-Asylum suit in-universe. One side effect I realised is that this suit somewhat cannibalises my Arkham Asylum and City Refit skins, but since I originally made the latter when I wasn’t all that good at modelling and sculpting I don’t see this as much of a loss and they still look fairly different from this suit. This skin is probably what I would have made if I was already as skilled back then. Either way, I hope you’ll enjoy this skin as well.

Installation Notes

This skin pack requires that you own the Flashpoint Paradox Skin as well as the Bat-Family Skin Pack and have them installed.

To install this mod simply drop the RBmProtoAsylum folder from the unpacked download into Batman Arkham Knight/DLC/<pick any folder> (I use 356474) (the entire folder, not just its contents).