I finished my first armor set.
The inspiration for the color scheme comes from the bad guys in the final battle of the Spartacus TV show prequel. Just for fun I will probably do the red & black color scheme that the heroes wear too, with steel armor instead of bronze.
This was made using a mix of assets and stuff I made from scratch. The assets require a lot of manual fitting to work with the character model, but it's still much more efficient than trying to attempt the complex pieces by myself, especially with my limited skills.
The model would obviously benefit a lot from a fine detail pass to really make it pop, but that doesn't matter too much at this point. I wanted to prototype something that would approximate the look and feel I have envisioned for my characters, and I'm happy with the result. It's a confidence booster to have even made it this far and feels like I've passed the first major hurdle to actually making this game a reality.
The next step will be to create a polished combat demo, which obviously will be a major challenge because 3D animation is currently an almost complete unknown to me. But if I can get past that, then I feel like the question of "can I actually do this" will be answered, because there's nothing else in the game that should be all that complicated to build. From there it's just a matter of being willing to do the work.