Hi folks,
I’ve made some artwork stuff again as some of you might have already guessed from my recent mod releases for Arkham Knight. That also includes some things I wanted to do for quite a long time, namely giving the Arkham Asylum and City cowls some brand new meshes that aren’t horribly low-poly anymore as well as the “classic” blue and grey Burton suit as seen in The Flash.
Aside from that I’ve also been working on a minor combat SFX overhaul and will also give the combat VFX an update in the future, since those parts could use some improvements and I want to bring the SFX a bit closer to the style of Arkham Asylum rather than the tech-y and somewhat over the top SFX style of Arkham Knight.
The Classic Burton Batsuit
This is a suit that I’ve been planning to make for quite a long time, since last summer in fact. Back then I then just decided to instead work on an original design of the same theme, which became my armoured blue and grey Burton suit, or the High-Mobility Suit as I called it in-game.
As there isn’t a whole lot of footage or good images of the actual final suit prop I’ve taken more substantial liberties than usual with this one, as I had to improvise a lot of the actual details or shapes that just weren’t discernible on any images of it. Needless to say that it turned out quite nicely and it gave me an opportunity to experiment with some new shading ideas I had, featuring my recently overhauled anisotropic shading solutions. One of the new ideas I had was to use the cavity maps that I already use for roughness variation and specular occlusion to add some subtle metal weathering, which worked quite nicely on the metallic mid-piece of the belt.
Determining the right material details has been proven to be surprisingly difficult on this suit, as I’ve experimented with quite a lot of different types of leather or rubber material details until I’ve finally settled on the cross-quilted pattern on the body suit (which isn’t too dissimilar from the original Arkham suits) and a more bull-leather kind of detail on the cowl and trunks.
The boots and gloves are obviously just kitbashed from the 1989 suit, as those also seemed to be pretty much the same on the original movie prop, no need to reinvent the wheel on those.
This suit is also available as a mod for Arkham Knight as part of my second Burton Skin Pack.
A blue and grey version of the 2023 Burton Suit
This was more of a spontaneous idea I had, as my original blue and grey armoured suit continues to be pretty much impossible to port to Arkham Knight, so I decided to make this as a substitute to include in my second Burton Skin Pack.
Since this suit also has some nice unique material details I thought I’d showcase it here as well.
Updated Arkham Asylum and City Suits
I’ve finally made a brand new cowl mesh for the Asylum and City suits, which is something that was long overdue as the previous cowl mesh was from the original suit models and quite low-poly compared to my reworked body meshes, let alone the other suits I’ve made. Naturally I’ve also added my own touch to the cowl design here and there, with some inspiration from the model that Blur Studio made for the Arkham City cinematic trailer as well as from some of my Burton Cowls.
Another advantage of making the cowls from scratch was that I could properly fit it to the Arkham Knight Batman face mesh that I’m using in my project, so it now looks like it belongs with it.
Aside from that I have also updated the boots and gauntlets on the City suit, which now use the updated models from Return to Arkham as those match the rest of the suit a lot better. The asylum suit has also received some small updates outside of the cowl, most prominently a new emblem mesh as the old one was pretty bad as I wasn’t much of a modeller when I made it lol. I’ve also taken this chance to update the materials of it as well, so it’s not only much crisper but also a lot better looking now, thanks to a new anisotropic clear-coat material I made for it this time.
New Gliding Capes for the 1989 and 1992 Burton Suits
Some of you probably know this from the recent update to my Burton Skin Pack for Arkham Knight, but I also wanted to showcase it here as well, since the new gliding capes turned out very nice and really fit the stylised and very expressive look and feel of these suits (and would surely look terrifying if you saw those shapes closing in on you from the shadows).
What’s next?
My next goal is to finish another original design of mine, this time a sort-of “proto-asylum” suit design that’s somewhere between Arkham Origins and Arkham Asylum. If everything works out as I expect it should be another standout addition for sure, and it’ll obviously also be available as a mod for Arkham Knight once it’s finished.
And that’s it for this update :)
Please make sure to check the FAQ before asking questions about this project.