Cutting smooth lines on a round model? Help with topology

[Nathi Tappan]

Hi there,

I’m trying to model a helmet as precisely as I can and got a little stuck on how to achieve some cuts on the spherical shape. 

Do you have any suggestions on which technique I should look into for cutting a curved line across the sphere while keeping good quad topology?

I’ll also need to indent some areas on the shape and can’t quite achieve the curved lines without adding a lot of vertices. Is that the way to go? What do you recommend?

And last, but not least, would you first shape the indents and then separate the helmet in the two pieces, or the other way around?

Here are some reference images of what these helmets look like (though I isolated the part that I’m currently working on for the screenshots):

Thank you for any insight!

[Martin Bergwerf]

Ni Nathalia,

There are of course other ways, but in this case, I would probably first cut out (or ‘slice’, or join) the shapes with Boolean Modifiers. Then, when I am happy with how it looks, Apply the Modifiers and go into Edit Mode, to fix the Topology…or even do a complete Retopology.

[Omar Domenech]

You’re up against a boss fight Nathalia, and not just any boss fight, it’s not even the last boss, it’s the bonus boss that you can’t even beat after you beat the last boss. Shapes such as those are among the most difficult to model. If you tackle it directly, trying to get the shape to work and edges to flow without a template to follow, it is much harder. So what people usually do is first sketch a draft using booleans or sculpting, something messy topology-wise but that gets all the shapes in that for you to later retopo and have a base to adhere to. 

Kent has the perfect course for this, he uses all the techniques necessary. It’s an older course but the knowledge is the same no matter the Blender being used:

https://cgcookie.com/courses/modeling-a-sci-fi-helmet-in-blender

[Nathi Tappan]

Well then, I don’t feel that bad for being a little stumped now. Lol. Thank you for that… what a great choice for a first project on my own, eh? 😅

Thank you both for the insight… booleans and fixing/retopology it is.

I did watch Kent’s course! It truly is relevant regardless of the Blender version. Maybe I should have fully followed along before starting this one, but here we are. 

[Author]

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