This blog is to show my progress while making the Corinthian helmet. I have taken some inspiration from the movie 300 also which isn’t completely historically accurate.
I have started to model the low poly version of my Corinthian helmet. To get an idea of how to model this I imported an image of a helmet facing forward so that I would be able to make the nose and cheek plates for the helmet. To get the general shape of the helmet I created a ball object, cut it in half and shaped it to the image until I got to the eye holes of the helmet. When I reached this point I had to shape the balls front and back parts separately.
The picture above shows what I had after I made the model after the 2D image I’ve imported while adding the start of the back neck protection. If I stopped modelling here I would still look a lot like a Corinthian helmet however, I wanted to add extra details like the forehead triangle plate and the plume.
The image above shows that I have added a roughly modelled plume and a rough version of the triangle plate on the forehead. With this version of the helmet the ear cut outs stick out of the head a bit too much and are a it too wide. The plume ended up having a bump at the back which I had to correct later on.
Here is the smooth version of the helmet with added detail to the plume. Also, I have added more edges to the top of the forehead to the tip of the nose plate so it has a defined edge like most Corinthian helmets. The cheek plates have been pulled out further and the bottom of the plates have been pulled out further than the rest to give a defined curve. I added a flat part to the back neck protection to make the helmet look more realistic.
After some mild editing I have reduced the height of the triangle plate and gave it some more curve near the top. I have also reduced the width of the ear holes and stuck them further into the helmet to stop the curving. On this stage of the helmet build I concentrated on the plume making it look less soft and giving it a slightly chunkier bottom.
After a few minor changes like making the eye slots smaller and straightening the forehead plate, I made a UV map of the helmet ready for texturing. Another addition I made was making the lead up to the triangle smoother.
I also made a spear of Greek design to place next to my helmet when making the environment. For the environment the helmet will be on a small pillar with the weapons scattered around.
The image above shows the helmet imported into mudbox. The only changes I made to the helmet at this point was smoothed some of the edges down. The reason why the helmet has been imported into mudbox is so that I can add extra details quickly like battle scars and engravings.
After I duplicated the model and added more subdivisions, this left me with a high poly version of the model. The model ended up looking weird after this. However, this can be fixed in mudbox.
This image shows the helmet after I have done a lot of sculpting to add detail. By using the sculpt tool on Mudbox I added the edging around the nose to cheek plates, I used the knife tool to create the scratches and plume engravings. Also, I used the smoothing tool with the flatten tool to smooth down the edges of the helmet. One problem that I had while sculpting was towards the bottom of the helmet at the cheek plates, which is that the sculpting near that area is rather rough which has prevented me from carrying on the scratches from above the eye to the cheek plates. A way to fix this would be to add edge loops to the cheek plates however, I don’t think I am able to do this without restarting the whole sculpting process.
I was tasked to create an environment for the helmet. I took me a while to decide what I want the environment to look like, I opted to include some Greek style columns. First I was going to go with a Corinthian design but the design is complicated and would be too time consuming to firstly create it, then UV it and then texture it so I have created a simpler style, the Doric style. To get the shape of the pillar I created a cylinder then kept extruding it and added more edge loops so I could create the stacked column look.
This is the finished normal map for the helmet, when applied this will add the effect of scratches and bumps to the helmet while keeping it low poly. With being able to edit the normal map in Photoshop I have been able the make some parts of the helmet look better, now the scratches at the eyes carry on down to the cheek plates.
An image of the low poly helmet with the normal map applied.
A side by side comparison of the high poly helmet (left) and the low poly helmet with the normal map added (right).
This is the environment I created for the helmet and the spear. I made this in my own time at home.
This is what I have so far for the texture for the helmet. The yellow colour is meant to create a bronze effect, the darker parts on the plume are to make the engraving stand out. The silver parts of the texture are there to represent scars from Iron weapons clashing with the helmet. The specs are there to represent the dirt collected when in a battle.
This is an example of the helmet and the spear with the texture map applied to it.
A picture of the shield with the texture applied. Some parts of the texture needs brushing up, like the black rings so they look smoother.
this picture shows the objects together placed inside of the Greek building, I changed the materials of the helmet and the shield from Lambert to Phong E which adds a shine to the models w=giving them a more metallic look.
Here is a wider angle of the scene which shows off the full building with the textures applied to it. However, the texture that was previously applied to the terrain was removed when transferring the file from google drive.
A close up picture of the helmet using the Phong E material to show off the light bouncing off the normal map.
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