More alphas

I really liked using alphas so i took them and started working them over some other parts of my sculpt that I feel could almost be finished enough to utilise them and also to experiment.

Here is a close up of the cloth using the alpha texture, I am confident leaving it there for now since I won't be working on that subtool for a while now and I can easily undo it. I tried to be quite subtle about just suggesting the material rather than printing it over the whole thing in a really obvious way, as that is kind of the effect you would get looking at it in real life. I may have done this at too low a polycount but I can undo and increase that later if I need to, I may add some further detail to the creases first too.

I got a bit liberal with the alphas in the helmet, the reason being that I intend on redoing it later anyway (it's a placeholder for now) I just really wanted to experiment with some mixture of alphas to create different textures along the helmet. For example I used the lines on the top of the helmet to really differentiate the material and went with more smooth with scratches for the body of the helmet. in the cheek crevices I changed the material again adding a bit of texture as a stylistic choice and to add variation.

I used a premade chainmail alpha for the chainmail but I'm not sure how I feel about it, perhaps I just need practice but I am finding it difficult to get the texture consistent. I may try again but on the other hand I am wondering how necessary it really is to have it uniform anyway as it may not actually make all that much difference.

 I made this really quick mock alpha just to try it out on the helmet since I wanted some pseudo-Arabic kind of inscribings on it (I feel this gives the character more a sense of purpose, having a religion or creed) I think I need to make the background a 50% grey as the white actually makes the whole thing bulge out, I managed to minimise the damage using focal shift and the smooth tool but in my final attempt it would be better to not have to do that.