Football Helmet

[sic]

I've been asked to model a football helmet for work. I realize this is a job for poly's and unfortunately most of my modeling experience is w/NURBS.

Can anyone please help w/ tips on approach or point me to a tutorial. I've done extensive searches for help and accumalated decent reference, now i just need some direction. I don't have a ton of time to experiment w/techniques on this project so any help would be beneficial to me.

thx in advance.

[idagrove]

Well, I guess it's like modeling a head without a face. You might just start with a sphere and start carving chunks out of it. Build up padding and face guard after the basic helmet shape. I'd probably do the facemask in nurbs by extruding circular curves for the piping.

[jtk77]

Acualy, I modeled a football helmet in NURBS thats worked well for what it was intended for. Like side shot logo graphics and helmit smashes, the normal stuff tv stuff.
So if you like using NURBS, no reason not to. I did it with birals for the pads, plastic and helmet core parts and extrudes for the face mask/cage.
Though, if I recall, the screw heads for the guards were poly. It only took me a work day to get it to the point of being signed off on. I think with polys it might have taken longer. Well, that and if I had a helmet to know what it looked like, haha that would have sped things up..I'm not exactly a sports fan
This is how it turned out, I sent it to iguana renderer for a HDRI test a while ago

Its not perfect, but like I said, for what I used it for, it worked great. Good luck man.