Kabuto Helmet Modelling Process

 Kabuto Helmet

After whatI had made thus far I decided to stick with the theme, I wanted something that, were I to pose all my models together, would fit in nicely. I landed on a samurai’s helmet. My goal with this build was to design something new, something that wasn’t from a
photograph.

I started this build by creating a polygon primitive

Pipe, I altered the thickness to suit what I had in mind.

I then started to flare the pipe by place cuts (holding Ctrl on the multi-cut tool). 

once I had a dome shape I selected the vertices from the uppermost inner ring and merged them all to centre, and did the same again with the outermost ring. This gave me the desired dome shape I was looking for 

I then selected some faces from the bottom of my dome and used the extrude tool to create the step shaped neck guard and the bill at the front of the helmet.

I extruded outwards a small amount then I hit extrude again to bring it down a lot more.

At this point I had the main shape done, so I started to work on the ornamental parts

I used another pipe shape and deleted some of the faces, brought it close to my model and created a bridge between the two. This cave me a nice circular shape rather than having to extrude my own

I then created the main ornament that sits atop the helmet, I knew I wanted a crescent moon design but like the Torii Gates I wanted to incorporate my new branding.

I lad down a plane and cut out the shape I wanted from it, a crescent mood with an enso circle affixed to the centre, I then used the extrude tool to gain the thickness and make sure that I wasn’t working with 1 sided polygons.

Had I wanted I could have probably stopped the build there and be done with it, but I wanted a face mask to go with the helmet, I built it much like the head ornament.

I created a plane and cut out the rough shape I needed for a face. Except this time I started to use the vertex points to bend the mask around. 

I had the curve on the X axis down but I couldn’t figure out how to make the Y axis look smooth. That is until I used a non-linear Bend deformer to bend where I needed it..

After messing around for a while I got all the features on the mask looking to scale.

I used the Smooth tool to make it look more like a face and less sharp.

The only part left was the teeth 

I created polygon cones, reduced the faces and laid cuts along the length. I used the Bend tool again to get the right shape. I created cubes and used the bevel tool to create the rest of the teeth, I laid them into place and was finished with the model.

Texturing my Third model became a lot easier as I had worked out a lot of what I was doing wrong before.

Also I decided that I wanted this to be more of a museum show piece than an actual battle worn helmet so I wouldn’t need to add any degradation.

I started off by making a folder and turning the entire model into matt black painted steel

I then turned the teeth red and made the ornament gold.

Again I was at a point where it would have been easy to stop there and say the model is done but I wanted to add more detail until I was proud of my progress.

I spent some time making sure the details matched my vision. To start I added a texture of brushed metal to the gold to make it look more interesting - I was going to have it look extremely polished and flat but it didn’t look quite right.

I then added red stitches to the helmet skirt by using alphas with some height and stamping them across the radius

I spent the most time after that on the wing details, all the little accoutrements that make the helmet look nice, I started by adding the big white rectangle using a fill layer and an alpha, I used a box, clicked on my starting position and held left shift to create a trajectory and released to fill in everything between the 2 points. I then used alphas with height to create different shapes in gold, later adding fabric diamonds to complete the design