For me, it's frustrating because I'm not much of an artist. To me, an artist captures a feel, personally, I do my damndest to capture what's actually there. I have the curse of being a perfectionist, and work with a guy that's production time driven.. "more per hour is better than soaking up production time in exta accuracy."
To make things worse, if you had a way to extract the armor models from the game disks, and had one of those 3d printers, and just printed it from that, it wouldn't fit anyone.
Even scaled to a 6 foot person, you would not even be able to stand correctly, let alone move. So my job is to take what's there, stretch and squeeze it, and try to come out with stuff that leaves black areas that look similar to the black areas left on the Master Chief.
When you look at something that's accurate.. there's a certain "ping" you get when you realize it's accurate. Your brain knows what stuff is supposed to look like; it's recognition abilites has a starting point, and when you match that starting point, your brain will tell you. It's like the difference of saying, "Hey look! a human being..", "Hey, that's someone trying to look like my mom!", and "Hey, that IS my mom!",
If you digitized the action figure, and inserted it into the game, you'd be like "holy crap.. what happened there?" It's good enough for some, but I'm not some.. I can't even glance at nightmare armor or the action figures without noting how far they are from where they should be.
So.. by adding things, like shoulder/chest mass, you can get closer to it, plus the suit itself can be made to look like the padded undersuit in the game. By making a person wider at the shoulders, I can increase the chestplate height, drop the crotch slightly under the crotch plate (master chief has no testicles.. NONE.. ) allowing for cleaner lines down there. I can get a little more length on the bicep armour, and then require the wearer to wear a couple inches of raised boots.
End result is something that looks more like the game character, but there's tradeoffs... it costs more, takes longer to develop, hampers some movements, etc, but damn.. you ARE as much Masterchief as I can make you.
Where's the line you draw for an acceptable trade off? I don't like the concept of "meh.. no one will remember exactly what it looks like.".. that's bull because if I magically manage to nail it.. there's no denying that instead of grins, and "cool master chief", you'd get: "Holy crap! is that the actual movie suit?"
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