#rvb ref

From a Character Design Standpoint:

When I came up with the characters I made for TLRH, I had a general idea of what their personalities would be like, and used that as a reference point for what THEY should look like.

For example, I knew I wanted Fox to basically be Kimball's polar opposite in terms of personality and methodology. Kimball has a more "hearts and minds" philosophy (imo) and Fox has a more "shock and awe" philosophy. So I decided to give Fox armor that reflected their differences.

Fox's armor is dark and pointy. Kimball's is light and curved. Both of them have the light blue markings, however, because they both hold leadership positions.

You can kinda see the differences in this (very old) drawing of them together.

From a Technical Standpoint:

When coming up with armor, I'll usually just google "Halo 4 armor" or something similar and look for either official concept art or 3D turn-arounds of the models found in-game. The latter can generally be found on Artstation.

I also like to kitbash armor sets like so:

This was done by grabbing pieces of armor from this poster of all the Halo 4 armor and bashing them together until I got what I wanted. This was how I came up with the armor for both Fox and Sampson. (The only downside to this method is that it's limited to only Halo 4 armor and doesn't have the Prefect or ODST armor sets.)

Honestly the hardest part of figuring out what kind of armor to give a character is learning the NAME of a particular set of armor so you can look it up on Google Images. Usually though, if you search for something like "Halo 5 helmets" you should be able to find something like this that at least gives you some names. And then you can go from there.

Here's some links that can be helpful also:

Vanity - Allows you to build a character with the armor from Halo Reach. Works similarly to a character customization screen.

405th armory - 3D models of ALL Halo armor from every game. You'll need to download and learn how to use a 3D modeling software (like Blender) to actually benefit from this link.

Also, if you're able to, buying the Master Chief collection can be a great resource too. All the games allow you to customize your Spartan so you can grab references for their armor, or just see what your character would look like! It's definitely not the cheapest option, but depending on what you're trying to do, it can be worth it.