Space Helmet (part 2)

Space Helmet Design Detail

Continuing from the previous post, I worked on this design further detailing design elements. I don't think the design itself works particulaly well, but there are elements which I liked. What interests me here is the mixture of the hard surface shell and the glass visor, however the angle of the helmet would be very uncomfortable.

Also the seal of the helmet is not addressed and is obviously very important to maintain pressure. So there is much more work on this design that needs to be done. Hopefully I'll get some time to work on this, but I think my strategy would be to revert to the previous sketches rather than try to rescue this version.

I pasted a Poser character's head into this illustration to show some scale and position of the head inside the helmet design. Its interesting because it immediately forces you to reconsider and re-evaluate the design from a ergonomic perspective... ah well back to the drawing board, literally!

Space Helmet Concept

Space Helmet Development Sketches

A selection of sketches showing the development of a space helmet concept. This one started of with some random brush strokes using various Photoshop brushes, I wasn't to sure of the direction of the design at the beginning. It was a case of figuring out the visor direction as a way orientating the design. Once that was done the rest started to fall into place.

I think with this concept however the above sketches had something dynamic which I lost in the next, more detailed sketch ( I'll post the detail sketch next ). I may take this design back a few stages before I progress any further.

As you can probably see from these 3 the design elements were driven by the shapes from the Photoshop brushes. Once you orientate your eye to the apparent 'mess' created by the brushes then it becomes more of a decision making process of  "OK this shape could be the backpack, this shape is a breathing tube." etc... Those decisions can be good or bad in terms of design choices, with my design being the latter :)

Cyborg paint over

Cyborg paint over

One of the things I find interesting as an exercise is to listen to movies for inspiration. Movies can give a very strong visual cues for artwork, we see this all the time with fan art. I've got nothing against fan art of course, but what I like to experiment with are the more subtle cues from the movie dialogue itself.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. I'm not quoting word for word here (there are many that can I'm sure) but in the original Terminator movie the character Reese explains to Sarah Conner about the Terminator. He explains to her that underneath the skin there is a heavily armoured combat chassis and we finally get to see it later in the movie. The key word for me here is chassis,  because it has interesting connotations when thinking about design. The Terminator has an endoskeleton chassis. My sketch was based on an exoskeleton and the thought of this cyborg hunting a person down with this aggressive, light-weight chassis was interesting. The lack of emotion is helped by reducing the head to something without facial detail or expression.

There are elements in my design of course which are lifted directly from Stan Winston's superb Predator (the shoulder mounted tracking weapon) and again the lack of facial details which I explained in my earlier post being West World inspired. The left arm shows some skin to remind the viewer of the human parts used when this cyborg was created.

So the technique here is very simple, I used a photograph as reference for the pose and did a paint over job to explain the concept of the chassis. It's only at a development stage, but I have enough information in this sketch to take it forward. The goal is to create a 3D model in LightWave 3D and create a final render. Hope you found it interesting.

Development from Poser to Concept

Development stages from Poser to Concept

This is a breakdown of the previous post. Beginning with the Poser Render, 3 lights were setup, 2 intense white lights either side of the head and a central negative light. The render is taken into Photoshop and ran through filters, with layer blend modes. I looked for interesting shapes and forms and then started to paint in and erase. Towards the end of the process its a bit like sculpting.

The interesting thing about working like this is using black and white to begin with, because it eliminates a lot of information, forcing you to focus on the design early on in the process. The concept of using lights to sculpt form is the key ( especially the negative lights ) to getting the random results with the filters.

Ultimately you have to look for those visual clues in the development stages which take you on the journey to developing the character, costume etc. Hope you find it useful, comments, questions, general chat welcome.

Anohter Head Helmet

Costume / Helmet Design

This design is an old one which started off as a render in Poser. I used a succession of filters in Photoshop then to distort and warp the original to look for shapes. I then cut and pasted some photographic elements, which were painted over and worked into the design.

Helmet Design Test

Helmet design sketches  using Photoshop and Poser

This was an experiment using Poser and Photoshop. Its a technique that uses Photoshop brushes to block in shapes from a series of images I generate in Poser. The manual paint over at the end just refines the result of playing with the brush shapes. The one on the right is a little too Predator-ish, but its good fun. The left image is more interesting to me because of the lack facial detail, which always freaks me out. I think its from when I saw West World as a kid, the cowboy robot without a face. Oh the mental scars do surface when drawing...