Diablo III-Style Helmet (Fan Art)

These are the rough steps I used to create a low-poly “fan art” helmet done in a Diablo III style. The design is based off of a fantastic piece of Diablo IV Barbarian art by Igor Sidorenko.

You can see Igor's Work here: https://www.artstation.com/sidwill
You can see the piece of Diablo IV art I referenced here in the Diablo IV BlizzCon 2019 Press Kit: https://blizzard.gamespress.com/Diablo-IV---BlizzCon-2019-Press-Kit

First, I created a mock-up of the helmet in ZBrush. I added a head and quick beard to help me get a read on the landmarks of the helmet as compared roughly to a “Barbarian” head.

Then I simplified the sculpt output it as an *.OBJ so I could work on it in Maya.

In Maya, I used Quad Draw to draw in quads, and then switched to tris and methodically simplified the mesh until I was happy with how things were flowing. Then I mirrored everything and refined the mesh further.

Then it was time for UVs!

Next, I baked out an AO from my simplified sculpt to my low poly.

Then, I used Photoshop to rough in the colors and key landmarks I was hoping to get across in the low poly texture map.

When I was happy with that, I scaled everything down to 128 x 128 pixels and started pushing pixels to tighten things up.
Once I was happy with that, I made a specular map to go along with it.

And here’s the final result, as seen in Maya! It is composed of 552 tris and includes a 128 x 128 diffuse and specular map. It was a fun fan art project!