Roman legionnaire helmet

Disclaimer: This was an already completed project and I am taking you through the process after it had already been completed.

As a big fan of ancient Rome, I decided I wanted to make the helmet that the roman infantry used. As always, I gathered some reference images.

This is the low poly, this ended up going through some transformations because I had more trouble with this model than I thought I was going to.

The high poly also had to go through some changes to make it easier for baking the AO and normal maps

The first bakes I did through xNormals ended up pretty rough.  Their was no easy way to make the envelope fit well, so I ended up having to move it by hand, which easily took me 2 hours of refining.

Their were problems with the normals bleeding into other parts of the model where they should not have been. And the AO was not hugging the edges that well  and tended to be too far away.

The most annoying part was that I could not use the global extrusion slider because increasing the envelope globally cause all sorts of problems, such as normals bleeding into other geometry.

After a couple hours of refinement, I ended up with something better, but there was still some more cleanup to be done.

So what I ended up doing was hand fixing the textures in Photoshop. I meticulously hand fixed the normal, AO, and curvature map.  It was very annoying.

So after most of these problems were ironed out, I started to flesh out the texture more, adding a diffuse and spec map.  This is also the first time  I played around with a specularity map that consisted of colors outside grayscale.  These next pictures were when I started to render it in Marmoset Toolbag

I decided that I wanted the metal to give off a copper specularity.  This went through many iterations until I was satisfied. I changed the color of the base metal itself, I changed color of the yellow metal to a more yellow red hue, and the spec map went through many changes with the color intensity's ranging quite a bit. I also played around with multiple lighting setups.

This is what I ended up with.

This was a more complex  piece compared to what I  have done in terms of shape, which gave me many small problems along many of the edges.  But I learned some ways to overcome that and was able to start understanding  more about different materials specularities.