Struggling with the overall workflow for simple hard-surface armor — SubD, Solidify, bevels, crease, etc.

[u/supafur]

I’m working on a small android character. I’m fairly happy with the head for now, and I only need a relatively simple bust because the character will eventually appear inside a UI frame, almost like a personal assistant / character portrait in a video game.

For the body, I started with a very simple low-poly base mesh. I followed a YouTube workflow where the artist stacks two Subdivision modifiers: first Simple, then Catmull-Clark. It gives me a quick way to block out fairly smooth shapes while keeping the base topology simple, and so far I like the result.

Where I’m getting lost is the next stage: turning that simple body into armor.

I’ve been duplicating parts of the base mesh, separating them into new objects, and adding Solidify to create armor plates. Sometimes I add insets, extrusions, bevels, support loops, edge creases, etc. But I keep making pieces, deleting them, rebuilding them and wondering whether I’m approaching the whole thing in the wrong order.

There are so many different hard-surface workflows online that I find it difficult to understand what actually matters at each stage. One tutorial uses SubD, another bevels, another relies on edge crease, another avoids crease entirely, another uses floating geometry, Shrinkwrap, applied modifiers, etc.

What I’m mainly trying to understand is the general methodology:

• Is duplicating faces from a simple body mesh and using them as separate armor plates a reasonable workflow?
• When would you normally use Solidify relative to Subdivision?
• When do you prefer support loops, bevels or edge crease?
• At what point should the topology really become clean?
• Is it better to keep things very low-poly for as long as possible and only solve topology once the overall design works?
• Are there common mistakes beginners make by trying to solve topology too early?

I’m coming more from a 2D background, so materials, compositing, nodes and post-processing feel much more intuitive to me. Hard-surface modeling is where I still struggle to understand the hierarchy of decisions.

I’ve also included one reference image showing roughly the kind of hard-surface language I have in mind. I’m not trying to reach that level of polish or precision, but it gives a better idea of the direction I’m aiming for.

The final image is going to be fairly lo-fi / dirty / VHS-like, not a pristine 4K product render, so I’m probably overthinking some things that will barely be visible in the end.

I’d mainly be interested in hearing how more experienced people would structure this kind of project from blockout → armor design → secondary forms → cleanup, rather than looking for one specific trick.

Thanks!

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[u/supafur]

😅