Modeling cheek\side guards of some historical helmets - topology suggestions ?

Orphydian

It seems people are more keen about modeling fantasy helmets or pseudo historical helmets seen from movies but little is known that actual helmets used along in history are equally fascinating. One forgotten era where there are superb examples of fascinating helmets is the hellenistic one (time period after the Alexander conquest of the Middle east followwed by the establishing of Macedonian dynasties in these lands). The constant wars between the Alexander successors, huge scale of these wars, the mix between the locals and the greek culture gave birth to a fascinating and refined panoply of weaponry within their armies.

What draw my attention lately where the helmets used by the soldiers that fought in the Macedonian style Phalanx. Some are very complex with dense decorations like a bearded cheeckguards, most of them were richly handpainted , addorned with big horse hair crests and feathers but I just want to model the most simple and still very well executed most common ones and later bother with the addornings.

 

The most intriguing part for me seems to be the cheek guards shape which in this period had known a crazy variety and develop , the focus being offer a great protection but also a nice commodity and fitting for the soldier, unlike the more well known in pop culture spartan or better said corinthian helmet which was used in the previous centuries which was bassically a closed one and the cheeck guards were more simple.

 

Ok Ive seen a couple of tutorials more or less at the right pace regarding helmets modeling in general with various softwares. One from Mike Hermes on youtube for Maya deals exactly whith one of this historical type He achieved a presentable result but in my opinion the cheeck guards can be way better shaped and defined and would probably need a different aproach.
What would the best way to approach such complex shape modeling order to achieve a very good matching with the original references. And what would be a good topology example for them. Im talking about traditional polygon modeling (no sculpting or anything else).

 

Thracian Kopais

 

 

 

more refferences here 

 

Thracian Melos 1

 

more refferences here 

 

Thracian Melos 2

 

more refferences here 

Thracian Beotian

 

 

more refferences here 

TheGabmeister

The best tutorial I've found for historical helmets is Michael Pavlovich's Ornate Lion Helmet. He used ZBrush at the beginning and then retopologized the mesh to game res by the end of the series.  I think Mike Hermes' approach would have been better if he used an actual head mesh so that he could fine tune the shape to really match the cheeks.

Alex_J

gabriel said everything i would suggest. my personal workflow would be, take head mesh, paint mask on it in zbrush, extract mask with thickness, use move and transpose+mask to get the very rough shape, then retopo in maya to start working with clean topology and use subD modeling from there.

You could probably start it off just using quad draw over a head mesh too. Maybe that's simpler as you don't need to swap programs at the start. Just depends how much you like to work in zbrush or not.

usually i find it easiest to build a weird shape by having some volume to work with first. figuring out topology is just way easier for me to visualize that way. And you can just trial and error more easily.

cool research you've done, let us see what you come up with soon.