Armor Concept guidelines - Conan Exiles

General Notes

• Conan Exiles is played in third person view, so the players spend a lot of time looking at the back of their characters. With this in mind always make sure to prioritize the back view, and make sure the back design is just as interesting as the front!

• Armor and clothing can to some degree displace the soft tissues and movable parts of the body. E.g. breasts and booties can be pushed into more desirable shapes, waistlines can be tightened in and feet and toes can be pushed into shape, all to achieve a more flattering silhouette.

Male and Female Versions
In most cases the female model is just a fitted version of the male model, but in some cases that is not the best solution. Keep this in mind, and design separate female pieces when necessary.

One example is if you want the male chest to be bare (showing nipples), then the female chest needs to be covered somehow:

Another example is when the male version has a lot of detail in the chest area. The female breasts are scalable in game, and therefore any amount of intricate detail in that area will cause a lot of distortion. This can be solved by designing a separate female top piece.

The range of breast sizes in Conan Exiles:

Armor Parts and Cut-Off Points

Conan Exiles equipment is broken up into 5 parts – Head, Top, Bottom, Hands and Feet. All armor and clothing pieces in the game can be worn interchangeably across sets, therefore the designs need to conform to these 5 sections.

• Head

  • All head pieces should stop roughly at the seam between head and top, although it can extend a bit down, just keep in mind that it might clip through excising top pieces with a lot of detail in the shoulder area.

• Top

  • Top pieces can extend up to the head seam, but should not go much higher up the neck. Top pieces can extend all the way down to the wrist area, right past the hands seam. Top pieces should not extend lover than the border between top and bottom.

  • A thing to keep in mind when designing long sleeved top pieces it that there will be a tucked mesh that is cut off at the top of the forearm seam, therefore you should avoid any details that would look bad when cut in half in this area.

• Bottom

  • Bottom pieces can start at or below the border between top and bottom, but should never extend above the top border. Bottom pieces may stretch all the way down to the feet, but can be shorter.

• Hands

  • Hand pieces can either stop below or at the seam between hands and forearms, or it HAS to extend up to the seam between the forearms and top, this is in order to work with the tucked mesh system in Conan Exiles. Leaving any parts below the hands and/or forearms seam as bare skin is totally fine, as long as the forearms seam is covered.

• Feet

  • Feet pieces can either stop below or at the feet seam, or it HAS to extend all the way up to the seam between legs and bottom (again because of the tucking system) Just as with the hands, it is totally fine to leave some of the feet as bare skin.

As every piece of the armor can be worn alone, or paired with pieces from any other armor set in game it is important that every piece works individually. For example in cases where the armor covers the waist both the bottom and top part of the armor needs to have a proper finish in the area where the split goes, so neither looks unfinished/not plausible on their own, in addition to looking good together.

Color Restrictions - 4 colors limit

All the armor and clothing colors in Conan Exiles are completely customizable through the dyeing system. However the dyeing system comes with the limitation of supporting only 4 colors per piece of armor (every piece has its own map, so for example the 4 colors used on the top piece doesn’t need to be the same 4 that is used in the helmet, or bottom piece). In addition, it is possible to make some areas not be dyeable, although it’s very undesirable as it restricts the players, which might lead to complaints. An example of when it is okay is when some of the armors contains bone/horns/antlers that has natural color gradient, that looks better undyed.

As the lightness is determined by a separate map, it is possible to stretch the conceived amount of colors by having a darker and lighter version of the same color. Like in this example, where the light and dark leather has the same color map but the lightness is different, so even though it looks like 2 colors it only takes up 1 color layer.

The dying restrictions also affects things like dirt, rust or corrosion, that normally will just take the color of whichever surface it’s on top of. In the case of the Argossean armors we ended up dedicating a color layer specifically for the copper corrosion (the turquoise parts of the metal shown below), so it is possible, just make sure to keep it in mind when making the design.

The goal is to always aim for the player to have as much customizability as possible, and at the same time look awesome!