I'll read through your suggestions again a few times until its fitting well in my brain lol. Good luck with Wonder Woman im not too young to remember her.  

Here's an example of the "Cybernetic" project that came as a "CC Essential Learning Resource" when I bought the "CC Essential Complete Bundle", I don't know if there's any other way to get it, I'm just now starting to play with it now myself.



Dell XPS 8900, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 3408 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s), 16 GB RAM, - 4 GB GeForce GTX 745, NVIDIA compatible.
Acer Aspire V Nitro Laptop,  2.5GHz Intel Core i5-7300HQ processor with 6MB cache,  256GB solid state drive, 16GB Ram,  4 GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics.

Thanks for your help guys. 

If you want to sculpt a higher poly version you can use Xnormal to bake maps to use for tessalation on the original mesh.

Not dissagreeing with swoop because he is right.
However I am not making wonder woman for a game.
I am mking her for video production.
Scenes for my video's are nowhere near as big as games so i am not worried about it.
In fact i have used her already in a few video scenes and it ran fine. Not slow ..... at all.
Also must be naughty of reallusion for using tessellation on their trenton charactor which also runs fine in scenes.

Oh and yes,, from a distance normal mapping works fine.
Untill you do closeups at an angle. Then it becomes obvious nothing is there.

i7-3770 3.4GHz CPU 16 GB Ram   
GeForce GTX1080 TI 11GB
Windows 10 Pro 64bit

Actually that should be your second consideration
What are you going to use your armored character for?

Because as pointed out by swooop, that will have major consideration for how to model it
Edit:- But then again i think you already reallise that

Like i said, my focus is on video production not games
So everything i say and do is for simple sceene video production only

Ie....used in iclone only

i7-3770 3.4GHz CPU 16 GB Ram   
GeForce GTX1080 TI 11GB
Windows 10 Pro 64bit

you also have a option to attach armor from other sources (separated from other models)
and save them as accesories, if you used CC they can be saved as  presets
it's best to do it in areas that don't bend like forearm-thigh-shin-head-upperchest.
just to avoid poke throughs.




.

Thanks again for your help and suggestions. I know there is a lot to be said for optimization how much i choose to optimize depends on how much i need to optimize. i would like to push the quality as high as i can but understand that with larger scenes optimization is often necessary. I intend to use the characters for a lot of action based scenes. The characters will need to look good close up with main characters. In regard to close ups the quality of the characters has improved greatly since i started with iclone (V4) and now after peaking the new PBR based shading i see the future being very bright indeed. 

IO

And your book is the only one worth following isn't it!
I learnt a long time ago from a quality manager where I worked.
How much quality do we need to put into our product? Enough to make the customer happy.
Quality higher than what is needed is a waste of time and money.

Anyway, I'm not going to get dragged into another discussion with you that floods this thread with opinions.
We have all given ideas, now either post new ideas or let the OP do it however they want.


i7-3770 3.4GHz CPU 16 GB Ram   
GeForce GTX1080 TI 11GB
Windows 10 Pro 64bit

I user this concept for my Real Wear line of clothing. However, this concept is very limited and would probably not work for full body armour because the prop will not bend with the character. This means the armour would need to be constructed out of many parts similar to medieval plate armor so that each piece can be attached to its own body piece. The most common "trouble" areas are joints where there is a lot of movement (such as shoulders, elbows, knees and so on). I have a "proof of concept" for a Trench Coat but it is very blocky due to the need to have pieces overlap to cover exposed areas when the joints move.
Of course, if the armor is supposed to be made up of parts then having some exposure in places would be realistic as opposed to a fault.



"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast