For this week’s assignment, we were asked to model a helmet, unwrap it and paint it in Substance Painter, as well as finally rendering it in Blender.
I decided to pull inspiration from Breath of the Wild again and model a helmet based on a Phantom Helmet, as it’s a nice design, and relatively simple in comparison to some other headgear in the game.
Slowly but surely I attempted to make this helmet shape, starting with a cube and extruding out from it, and also with help from a mirror modifier.
However, even after many attempts, I kept running into issues. After trying to create a nicer looking shape for this helmet, it ended up as a mess of vertices that I was finding really difficult to solve.
Every time I thought I had it, something would go wrong, and it was very discouraging. When I tried to import this helmet into SP, it absolutely did not work. I had to start over again.
I ended up deciding to go with a shape that was a little simpler. It looks sort of blocky, but at the same time I feel like there’s a sort of charm to it.
I did manage to bevel some edges but didn’t want to bevel up the ways in case I ran into an absolute mess of vertices again. I wanted to keep it relatively simple so that I could focus on trying to paint it in Substance Painter.
Thankfully, since I had previously had so much trouble with trying to get the hang of UV editing in the previous assignment, and since I had simplified the helmet’s shape, this time it actually ended up working.
(Other than a few things that I had missed here and there, but I fixed up what I could and otherwise was very glad that it wasn’t falling apart before my very eyes.)
Once I had averaged the UV islands scale and packed the islands, I was happy enough with my result! I did what I did with the class assignment and exported the helmet as a FBX file.
To my immense relief, it actually ended up working. So, with help from the class video about using SP, I got to work adding different textures to my helmet.
The only minor issue was that I couldn’t see the inside of the helmet.
I could still see the back of it clearly, though, and as shown in this screenshot it was still being affected by the textures, so I left it as it was for the time being.
I went through and started applying textures, mostly using fill layers and black masks. To my relief, Polygon Fill was actually working properly this time, so this made things a lot easier for me as well.
I had fun looking through all the different textures and trying to match up what I thought would look best for my helmet based on the reference I was using.
Following along with the video, I added a slight height map to add a little bit more to the texture. As well as that, I decided I liked the roughness of the texture I used for the horns, so I duplicated it and removed the colour, so that it would create a general rougher overlay over the helmet.
I baked the mesh maps for the helmet and I applied an ambient occlusion effect to the helmet like I did with the hammer in the class exercise in order to add some nicer shading, and added levels to adjust this. I also added a dirt mask like I did with my warhammer.
I had some fun painting on the blood on the horns, it’s very satisfying just being able to paint onto a 3D model like that, especially when the brush has some height to it, and especially using a drawing tablet! It definitely feels more like you’re actually in control of the texture, if that makes sense.
Other than the fresher blood on the horns, I also added this sort of bloody gradient effect on the helmet with the help of a dirt gradient and a spherical projection that I adjusted.
I also traced this pattern over the reference that I used, put it into substance painter and used it as a stencil in order to draw over it. I also added some height to it and it ended up looking really cool!
For the finishing touches, I messed around in the settings and polished things up, toned down the blood a bit, and put the stencil texture underneath the blood and dirt. I really liked the result that I had ended up with.
Once I was happy enough with everything, I went ahead and exported the textures from SP – above are my base colour, metallic, normal (OpenGL) and roughness textures that I exported.
Then I opened Blender back up, and started setting the textures up like I had with the warhammer.
Slowly but surely, everything was coming together, and the helmet started looking more and more like how it did in Substance Painter.
Although I was already very happy with how everything looked, I couldn’t help but wish that I could have kept the height texture as well, especially because it made the symbols on the head pop out more.
At first I tried to add the height map by messing around with the nodes on my own, however when I tried, I ended up giving the helmet an incomprehensible dark energy that surrounded it. So I decided to turn to Google instead.
It was really difficult to find any sort of tutorial on how to do this, but eventually, I actually managed to find one! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Yfp4WbqO9A
What I had to do was add the height texture to Blender, add a displacement node, and connect colour to height, then displacement to displacement. (I also connected the height image to the texture coordinate through UV like I did with the rest of the textures.)
I added a subdivision modifier and set it to simple, then went to material mode, and in surface I set the displacement as “displacement and bump”. Initially, when switching over to render mode, the helmet looked all dark like shown above.
In the displacement node, I turned down the scale a bit and it started looking a little less nightmarish. In order for this effect to work, I had to be using Cycles, but thankfully I was planning on using it to render this helmet anyway.
I set up a simple scene from a plane that I quickly extruded and bevelled. I decided to make the lighting rather dark due to the nature of the helmet and the bloody textures etc.
In the end, everything rendered very nicely, and I’m actually very happy with how this helmet turned out!
I learned a lot from this assignment, including a little bit more about modelling, about using Substance Painter and the different masks and mesh maps that you can take advantage of, and putting all of these back into Blender in order to render everything together.
If I were to do this project again, I think that I would attempt to make the design a bit more complex, or at the very least a little more rounded out. I would also attempt to connect the horns a little more gracefully to the helmet… and I would also make the inner edge go all the way around the helmet like in the reference I used, as I forgot to include that until I was already unwrapping the model.
Otherwise though, I think I’ve learnt a lot! I’m definitely slowly but surely becoming a lot more comfortable using Blender as a whole, and Substance Painter was very fun to use and experiment around in as well.