Hello everybody!
First, I’m just going to put this down, I’m not really used to blogging with text. This is the first legitimate attempt at putting together an actual history of work specifically through text and pictures. My purpose is to put together a complex history of the work I’m doing, although I don’t do a lot of it on the side outside of my professional job I thought it would be important to start doing this for not just in effort of looking for a new place to work but it’s fun to look back at what I’ve created…instead of just a series of folders on a hard drive that will inevitably crash one day. I mean, it happens, to everyone. If it hasn’t happened to you, it’s probably going to happen soon. I’m sure people slipped through the cracks, and congratulations to you, you little crack slipper. But I know I haven’t been that lucky. Anyways, on to the blog:
Finally I convinced work to pay for a copy of Substance Painter so I thought I would give the software a whirl on some side projects just to get more familiar. I hear a lot of good things about it, I don’t have a ton of usage for it day-to-day but I’ve seen what everybody’s doing – creating visually convincing model textures with it – and dang it, I’m jealous. So I thought I’d start with an easy project which was modeling Magneto’s original helmet. Not the 2000’s-era Bryan Singer garbage, but the original X-Men comic version of Magneto’s helmet. You know, the good one.
These are general screenshots in Substance Painter without rendering the 3D model with textures. I haven’t brought textures back into 3D Studio Max but I imagine it will look pretty similar once I get lighting figured out. That’s for future me, current me will just enjoy the prefab procedurally created lighting and reflections in the helmet and pretend that I put that together on purpose.
The low-poly version is 3170 polygons, most of those polygons being in the emblem on the top of the helmet. Otherwise the actual helmet piece by itself is fairly small being only 272 polygons. The high-poly version is significantly higher, probably too high, but I haven’t brought it back into 3D Studio Max for final renders yet so I’m not sure how everything is going to line up.
This was a fun exercise, it’s not complete, art never really is but it was fun just to get back in the habit of modeling something from image-planes. In fact, if you’d like to replicate this project and get started quickly here are the image planes that I used from searching all over Google for and put together.
The aspect ratios are exact so you should be able to set them up as your X and Y dimensions at your zero coordinates and get started right away.
I’ll admit, the one thing I missed is that on the crest of the helmet there is a rounded shape to the front of the shield… I absolutely spaced it until looking at it right now. How embarrassing. Honestly, I don’t want to go back and fix it. But it is really bothering me…
That’s it for now. See you in the future.
-mh
