Bronze Helmet - Personal project / study

Here's a little personal project that I worked on in some down time recently between work. I decided to put a little time back into brushing up my modelling, texturing and surfacing skills, since most of my professional work has been involved in leading and creating grooms. For this project I wanted to take a fairly simple object (in this case an ancient Bronze helmet, to tie it into one of my interests outside of work) but try and push it as far as I could in terms of realism / matching a ref.

I took some images of a helmet I found approachable as a starting point. I then did a little painting over the top to add some damage to the helmet to give a little more visual interest and story to the object.

All modelling was done in Zbrush. textures created in Substance Painter. Then Shading and Rendering done in Houdini with Arnold. In Houdini I took the opportunity to create my own rendering scene from scratch, setting up the lighting + rop nodes with custom AOVs for the final comp.

As a last bit of learning on this one, I wanted to develop some comp skills in Nuke. Taking my render from Houdini + adding in various extras in comp, DOF, chromatic aberration, lense dirt etc.