Sculpting Futuristic Battle Helmets
It's inspiring that armour designed during the middle ages was a major influence for the costume design for some of the Imperial characters as shown in some well know sci-fi movies. In this tutorial, we give a detailed sculpting session to create some exclusively designed helmets, some of which may not look out of place on an Imperial soldier!
Making real world armour includes a surprising mix of skills. The armourer is a combination of artist, scientist, toolmaker, metallurgist, chemist, and engineer. A good armourer will have an understanding of mathematics, geometry, metallurgy, woodworking, and leather-working thrown in as well.
Fortunately when sculpting virtual armour with ZBrush, you don't need all of the above skills, but there is still a fair amount to consider when thinking about the design!
John Haverkamp presents the sculpting process for some exclusive designs of armoured helmets. Once finished with some texturing done with Substance Painter, the helmets look spectacular!
Tutorial Videos
1) ZBrush Helmet Tutorial Length : 1 hour and 40 minutes.
2) Introduction to Substance Painter and workflow with ZBrush : 45 minutes
3) Includes bonus tutorial on ZBrush 4R7 features: 1 hour and 37 minutes
Requirements
Basic to Intermediate knowledge of ZBrush
ZBrush versions 4R6, 4R7 or 4R8 can be used to follow along to these tutorials.
About John Haverkamp
John Haverkamp was born in Ohio and then moved to the pristine Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia at a young age. There he spent a semi-isolated childhood re-enacting the Lord of the Rings and being corrupted by Dungeons and Dragons. Always with the fondness for the fantastical and medieval, Art school drove him deeper into Luddite territory by granting him the skills of a traditional metal-smith. This meant post-college jobs making copper fountains, welding and steel fabricating, casting and finishing bronze sculptures, and working for an architectural blacksmith throughout his twenties.
Digitally, John got sucked into cyberspace and the arcane mysteries of 3D studio max. The perfect software match for John was Zbrush discovered six years ago. Now he teaches digital arts part time, and constantly endeavors to improve his craft as a digital-sculptor and visualizer through personal work, illustration and indie game projects.
What's Included and Features
- You will learn:
- Concept sculpting with basic ZBrush brushes
- Design considerations around the dimensions of a 3D head
- Extracting clean armour plates from a rough concept mesh
- How to using ZBrush booleans to hollow out a helmet design to fit a character head perfectly
- Clean hard surface topology generation
- Introduction to Substance Painter and workflow required with ZBrush
- PLUS BONUS recording of features found in ZBrush 4R7
- ZBrush Helmet Tutorial Video Include:
- 00:00 Introduction
- 00:02 Final textured helmet shown first
- 00:05 Starting with a simplified head model as the base for the helmet.
- 00:10 Smoothing out prominent features
- 00:20 Excavating the helmet to show the eyes
- 00:25 Making ridges and cuts to aid in the design
- 00:30 Mouth area of the mask designed
- 00:35 Considering sectioning the helmet in pieces
- 00:40 Crisping up lines in the mask
- 00:50 The remesh sub tool
- 00:55 Extract double sided surface
- 01:00 ZSphere
- 01:04 Retopo and centre lines
- 01:15 Dynamic subdivision
- 01:20 Polish options
- 01:30 Discussion on Keyshot and Modo
- 01:35 Polyloop delete
- 01:40 Recommendations for ZBrush books and tutorials
Notes
- This product includes:
- 2 General Installers
Install Types:
Install Manager, Manual Install
