Looking For Suggestions/Tutorial Guides

[LOTS_OF_PYRO]

I'm looking to get into designing 3D Animated Motion Graphics.

1 of my biggest focuses I'm really interested in this field is the Motion Graphics and Animation in Sports Broadcasts/Highlights. I'm extremely big into sports as well. I coach Football, Umpire Baseball. I'm into Film/Photography and a lot of Action.

I've been trying to task myself in designing a bunch of 3D Sports Objects/Equipment. With that said, I'd figure I'd task myself with a challenge of trying to create a 3D model of a Football Helmet. All those Smooth surfaces of the Helmet Shell to all the creases within the bars of a Face Mask to the Interior Padding. It's definiately a lot of work, and I'm not one who wants to "Cheat" and jsut pull someoneelse's 3D Model for Free from a Site and just Re-Texture the Model(s). I've downloaded free Models in the past, and the UV Maps are just way too difficult to deal with.

1 Of the Main goals I wanna factor in and make my own 3D Model is for Simplicity of altering colours to specific parts and creating multiple teams from 1 Base Model. A Good example for this would be looking at any teams in Professional Football like the Detroit Lions with the Silver anmd Blue Helmets Vs.Green Bay Packers With the Yellow Shell and Green Mask Vs NE Patriots with Silver Shell and Red Mask. I'm lookign to basically be able to ensure I can ajdust the UV Mapping for say the Shell/Face mask/Interior/Screws/Decals So I can go in and jsut recolour 1 piece and not hurt any other parts of the model.

The Other Reason I'm interested in doing this Model is to also have it so I can do some 3D Animation. I live in a small community and I coach HS Football and I'm involved with multiple football Orgs and the Orgs are looking for the idea of modelling the Helmets to show in videos,

Anyone have any good Tutorials/Recommendations where I can start for this Moddleing? I'd love to see how cool this would become so things flow smoothly for textures once modelled.

[davescm]

What 3D software are you intending to use to create your models.

Dave

[LOTS_OF_PYRO]

I'm thinking either Blender (Free) or ZBrush. Might even try within Unreal Engine for something if it can be applicable.

I've used .obj files withing Photoshop for years and now Photoshop does't wanna work with them for me anymore and I wanna dry more dedicated modeling. So those are the programs I'm factoring in and not count Photoshop at this time

[davescm]

Blender is a good choice and, despite being free to use, is very capable.

There are thousands of tutorial videos on line but keep a look out for those using v3.0 or later (current version is 3.2). For those starting out, Andrew Price ( Blender Guru ) has some good starting series. His 'Donut' beginners tutorials give an overview of most things except UV unwrapping and rigging but will give you a flavour of Blenders capabilities.

For your particular use you want to cover modelling, UV unwrapping, texturing, animation and rendering.

For the helmet, make use of the mirror modifier which allows you to model one side only and have an exact replica of your modelling to form the other side. I like to use Substance Painter for texturing but it integrates well with Blender. Take your UV unwrapped models from Blender to Painter in fbx format. After texturing, use Blender's Node Wrangler add on to plug the maps into the Principled Shader in just one click.

Adobe also have a plug in for Blender which allows you to integrate sbsar materials directly into Blender.

Dave

[LOTS_OF_PYRO]

Sounds good to me! I appreciate the guidence!

I've tried a fiew times with 1 model and it looks liek Substance Painter doesn't like it like that sometimes. So the way I'm lookign at it is kinda like this idea for:

1. Sculpt The Mask
2. Scultpt The Outer Shell
3. Sculpt The Inner Padding
4. Sculpt The Hardware

Essentially, these would all be individual parts and so when painted is Substance Painter. This would allow me to ensure Each UV Part Listed above is it's own layer and doesn't affect the others.

[davescm · Accepted solution]

You can use different texture sets on different parts of a single model by assigning each part a material in Blender before exporting as fbx and importing to Substance Painter

Dave