ZBrushCentral

a hard surface helmet

Crosspost from Polycount - but I figured I can post it here as well :slight_smile:
Since I’ve always wanted to try hard surface sculptin in ZBrush but so far never really got into it I followed Joseph Drust’s excellent workflow tips and techniques. Really interesting infos. A lot of small tips and tricks I didn’t know. Initially I expected to test a few things but then get stuck and give it another shot some time later. Guess I was wrong:

Rendered in the new YEBIS2 viewport renderer inside Substance Designer 4.

Here are a few work in progress pictures:

The initial sculpt from a few polygroups.

I added a few more details and seams to make it feel more rigid and actually ut together from real parts since the forms are more ornamental than actually sensible function (shh - don’t tell anyone :wink: )
At this stage it’s a mixture between MegaMan X, Master Chief and Doom … and I liked it!

After retopology in Topogun I brought it over into Substance Designer since I had not actually thought about how I wanted to paint the model in the end.

Since I could not decide where I wanted the texture to go I figured - I had already tried hard surface sculpting, why not also try to texture it in Substance Painter as well…

Despite crashing every other 15 - 20 minutes Substance Painter is so awesome for testing surface combinations. Since I wanted to give it a more interesting contrast between glossy and rough surfaces I settled for a rough dark grey painted surface with glossy neon paint on top. To give a few more glossy contrasts the screws bacame a glossy black metal as well as edge scratches revealing a metal layer underneath. Then to give a few more variations I shot it with particles and dirt splotches.

I love how dDo2 shows off texture sheets so I blatantly copied the style. :wink:

Final statistics:
Prototyped and sculpted entirely in ZBrush - 7.2 million Polys over all subtools.
Retopology in Topogun - 2034 triangles.
Base texturing in Substance Painter Beta 0.5.0 (Build 333) with a little Photoshop help
Final Texture assembly and realtime renderings in Substance Designer 4.3

Attachments

helmet_base.jpg

helmet_strip_1.jpg

TextureSheet_render.jpg

helmet_strip_2_small.jpg

Helmet_WIP2_small.jpg

helmet_texturing_WIP.jpg

really nice post - I just completed the helmet series as well - still learning the workflow from Zbrush to outside applications so hearing how you did everything was very helpful. I Really like your textures and the sculpt was very clean - cool stuff.

cool work :+1:

@flatlineclothing: Thank you :slight_smile: - if you want to know something of the beyond-ZBrush-workflow in more detail just ask ahead. Glad it helped you.
@TomatoVFX Thanks.

why not using spotlight and layers for painting in z brush as well?

Mostly because I only get the colour information out of ZBrush. If I was going to render the helmet later on it wouldn’t matter that much to me because I would need to set up shaders and glossyness etc. anyways. In Substance Painter I can paint nearly this material definition in one stroke - better yet if I use material layers with masks I can twek many aspects with only a few clicks. The output I get from it can be used in - it looks like - most next-gen engines like Unreal or Unity 5. So actually it’s just a matter of flexibility and personal preference. In Painter I can edit my material definition where I am going to display/use/render the final object. :slight_smile: