Creating a Chest Armor Piece

Chest Armor Pieces are a great entry point into the TennoGen program — they let you explore any faction’s art style and give our Tenno community an opportunity to find an individual look for their Warframes. While Chest Armor Pieces offer creators a lot of freedom, there are some technical limitations and tips you’ll need to keep in mind to ensure your design performs well!

Modeling for games is well beyond the scope of these short guides. Luckily we live in a time with fabulous education resources available, and we recommend you do your research on how to get the most out of your tools.

Technical Specifications:

Chest Armor Pieces are intended to fit all Warframes, and the attachment peg should be long enough to fit into both the most convex and the most concave chests. There are general size boundaries that need to be respected to reduce clipping. You are welcome to push the envelope, but at your own risk. We reserve the right to reject pieces that unnecessarily go beyond the boundaries.

NOTE: Please keep the difference in size between Warframes in mind! A small dainty piece might show up well on Mag, but not make an impact on Chroma. We provide all the Warframe meshes, be sure to test how your piece performs on a variety of different Warframes.

Technical Specs:

• Triangle budget: 2,500
• Maps authored at 1024 x 1024.
  • In-game resolution: 512 x 512.
• Requires a full set of textures as per our Texturing Guide.
  • Non-Metals at roughly 50% luminance, or 128 on a 255 point scale.
  • Metals at roughly 80% luminance, or 186 on a 255 point scale.
• Attachment point needs to be along the bust.
• Chest pieces should be submitted at 0,0,0 (world center) and oriented accordingly.
• If you want to add a special scrolling texture to your emissives, you need to provide us with the file!
• For custom FX, please make sure it’s set up on a separate mesh that fits within the triangle budget, with its own material set/UV unwrap.

Artistically:

• While any Warframe appropriate style is welcome we are not looking for minor variations on the same idea. We are not looking for 50 variations of "cool metal spikes"; the more compelling and original your idea, the more we will appreciate it.
• Like all other TennoGen pieces, Armor pieces must be based on a Faction. We recommend looking at other armor pieces in that Faction for further inspiration, and to ensure you’re bringing a fresh idea to the game!
  • Ensure your armor piece includes design elements from its chosen Faction.
  • Do not use gold as the metal color (unless allowed in the Faction guidelines).
• Keep the construction of this piece in mind — how would it have been made? How do the various elements work together?
  • Simple panels and “toothpaste-y” swirls do not meet the detail level you’d see in-game.
  • Complex layers of materials are necessary to make this item fit in-universe.
  • Here’s an example of this complexity, when applied to Tenno metal details.
    https://imgur.com/BlBV8hc
• Avoid pop culture, copyrighted, or otherwise out-of-universe references, as outlined in our Common Reasons for Rejection.

Checklist:

Prior to submission, please refer to the handy checklist below to make sure your Armor Piece meets all the TennoGen criteria: