[Blender] I need some suggestions for the best way of doing the lacing on this 'samurai' helmet...

oraeles77

I'm doing a samurai helmet, its taking a lot longer than expected as the helmet has a complicated pattern of lacing. the photo examples supplied are one of many types of lacing found, you can ignore the laquering on the armour, I've already worked out how to do that.

whats Im having trouble with is working out the best way of doing the lacing, if this was 2010, I would have just had a single large poly with all of all the details drawn on to it, but as we are in 2018 and polycounts can be a little higher I think its better to physically make the lacing.

I've done one version which is just a 2d image with an alpha (the texture was done in Substacne designer, this render in Marmoset has  height as well but it doesn show here too well), like hair/beards on  game characters,

the other attempt is with lots of individual meshes representing the lacing, however each one had to be individually placed, manipulated to fit and I'd be honest, it looks a damn mess,

and it looks a bit odd. there must be a better way? 

so could someone suggest a better way? something which has maybe an array included or adjusts the roration of the face of the object so its always correct?

here is the outline I drew to work from, with a different model which I was also trying to work out a solution for the lacing.

JedTheKrampus

What I would try is to create a tilable displacement map without many details in an image editor. Apply the displacement to some subdivided polygons, then duplicate the mesh and decimate it a lot. Then bake normals from the non-decimated mesh to the decimated mesh. This wouldn't work well if you want the braiding to deform well, though. I don't know if those plates are supposed to move under each other or not. Depends on your requirements I guess.

Ruflse

I did something similar recently for another samurai helmet. What I did is just making a couple of rings as the laces and then I think I placed them manually (which was pretty masochistic by my part) with some metal pieces to hide the clipping a bit.




In your case since you are trying to create a lot more laces I would model something that looks like the laces. Then to place them select an edge loop from the metal plates of the helmet and convert it to a curve, and then for the lace use a combination of the array modifier with "Fit Type" set to the curve and a curve modifier also set to the same curve, and then modify the Tilt of the curve with Ctrl+T to set the orientation of the laces.

Remember to move the lace to the origin of the curve before using the modifiers, so it clones along it (for this you can place the 3D Cursor in the origin of the curve and then move the lace to the 3D Cursor). If you don't know how to do this here is a tutorial https://www.cgtrader.com/tutorials/1669-how-to-repeat-an-object-along-a-path-in-blender



Another way of doing this could be modelling the lace and then converting it to an InsertMesh brush in Zbrush to place them manually for more control.

Hope it helps!

oraeles77

JedTheKrampus said:

What I would try is to create a tilable displacement map without many details in an image editor. Apply the displacement to some subdivided polygons, then duplicate the mesh and decimate it a lot. Then bake normals from the non-decimated mesh to the decimated mesh. This wouldn't work well if you want the braiding to deform well, though. I don't know if those plates are supposed to move under each other or not. Depends on your requirements I guess.

in real life the plates would move similar to venetian blinds, but obviously in the current world of gaming it would take a huge amount of computer resources to have that so instead they are just fixed solid.

although i've been donig 3d stuff and blender for 5 years now, most of what you wrote above makes no sense to me!

" tilable displacement map" you mean make a gray height map, so you mean an average gray height map with some white lines/streaks in it representing the braids/lacing?

then use that height/displacement to create a mesh using a displacement modifier? yeah i think I sort of understand.

JedTheKrampus

Yeah, you're getting the gist of it. Displace modifier and decimate modifier. Could be tough to get a good clean result, so please do a quick and dirty version to make sure the result you get is good enough before you put a ton of effort into getting the displacement map absolutely perfect. Getting the exact result you want out of the displacement map can be tricky if you're not familiar.

I'm at work, working, so I'm terse out of necessity. Sorry about that.

For ruflse's technique, it would be faster to use duplifaces or dupliverts instead of manually placing each, but the idea of it is sound.