The final assignment was to create a helmet model, but to texture it in substance painter rather than solely using materials or UV maps. I was very indecisive on what helmet to model and went through many ideas. Originally, I tried to create Reinhardt’s helmet from Overwatch, but as I was modelling it, I struggled to really figure out the layout of his helmet and had a hard time figuring out how to properly get down the shapes, so I scrapped that model for now. Instead, I decided to go for something a little easier, so I could focus on practicing my skills in substance painter, so I did a Viking helmet instead. The model was pretty easy to make, by splitting a sphere in half, duplicating areas of it to make the shape and extruding and bevelling to refine it. I also added horns, which I originally attempted with a Beizer curve, but had trouble with that and decided to just use a cylinder and merge vertices at the tips of the horns. I also added small spikes as an extra detail. Once I was finished, I marked the seams and unwrapped UVs to organise them, using the checkered texture to help.

I then exported as an FBX file to get my helmet into substance painter. I found using substance painter to be really enjoyable as it has a lot more freedom to edit. I used black masks with the fill tool and mesh fill to help quickly texture the helmet. The war hammer tutorials were very helpful to look back on and follow along as I’m still inexperienced with the program. The preset brushes I primarily used was Iron raw damaged, Steel rough, Iron grinded, and Concrete bare for the horns. I made sure to give them all a higher roughness as this helmet is intended to be old and rusted. After I baked the maps I had an issue with these black lines on my object that did not come off no matter what I did. I looked online for solutions and figured out it was because there was too much overlap on my UV map, so I had to go back to blender to make sure there was no overlapping. After doing this my issue was fixed. I then used presets such as hard dirt, rust and damage to make the helmet look damaged and rusted, with dried blood on it. After I was satisfied with my model, I exported it and my smart maps to blender.

I tried to make the lighting effects really appealing such as using sun lighting and a spotlight on top, in yellow reddish colours to fit the theme. Overall, I really enjoyed learning substance painter and creating this model and I’m very excited to see what more can be done with substance painter.