A bit of a different artwork here as it's fully physical and actually wearable ^^
I love this armor in particular, among all the amazing designs we've seen in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, that one caught my eye and at a quite young age (11). Since then, I tried to craft this armor several times, but never went this close to the original design. This is an ongoing side-project, that took me longer than Star Wars Redemption to get there at some point. Aside from making games, you can see a line in my resume about "crafting armors" that seems to come out of nowhere, haha. So here it is, one of my other solid passions. I started with cardboard+gaffer, now I'm using EVA foam + paints, so maybe one day I'll forge it in metal ?
I used 3dsmax for shaping the shoulderpads, instead of the traditional pepakura that is widely recommended/used in cosplay, just to test out if a game art tool could also do the job for simple pieces (using UVs + a video projector). And yes ! This worked like a charm :) But for other parts it's some try'n error, guess measurements using cardboards as temporary armor plates and to lay down things easily before going on EVA cuts.
To get that "roughness/metalness" on the armor, I proceed quite similarly as when I'm into 3DCoat : I use 2 layers of Flexipaint "silvergrey", then I bring some wetness with a sponge or a clothrag, and I polish/buff it with graphite powder (which I manually got simply by sanding a graphite bar that is normally used for sketch drawing ^^). Graphite polish is what brings you to roughness 0 and metal 1. Then you want to get a more convincing look to it, like having some dirt in caveats and variations of relfection/metalness. Super simple ! Paint it roughly with black matte acrylics using a dry brush or a clothrag, then "clean" it with some wet cloth and come back over some of the edges to bring back reflect/metal up to your likings :) I tend to imagine where the armor can get more damaged/rusted and put more dirt there and it's really that same logic I have when texturing in 3DCoat :)
as for SWR, I might add updates to this post whenever I upgrade the armor set, I constantly see things that could look (or feel) better, so stay tuned =)