Some Hockey Masks

You might remember the hockey mask I modeled about three or four years ago, and posted last year with some shiny new Mental Ray materials.

Recently while working on the Summer Camp, I decided to revisit the mask and see if anything there was useful or if it was basically junk.  Originally, I had used boolean operations to cut out the eyes and vent holes, which leaves the mesh in pretty rough shape and needing a lot of cleanup.  I also shelled the model so it had thickness, doubling the number of issues with the booleans.

Mental Ray seemed to get along with the mesh just fine, rendering without errors.  I posted a nifty turnaround video of it to YouTube, which you can watch here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBSHTCmhAos

I wanted to see how it would behave in Daz, and while it wasn't terrible, there were some shading problems on some of the faces around the eyes and holes related to the way Daz smooths meshes.  With textures, these problems were minimized, but I thought I could do better without having to redo the entire mesh from scratch.

First, I deleted the inside of the mask and the edges so it was a single normal.  Then I capped all the holes and reworked the mesh in that area so everything was back to being quads with a nice clean edge flow.  Since I'd deleted more than half the geometry, this necessitated that I redo the UVW unwrap, which I did, upping the resolution from 2k to 4k.

From here the textures and maps were made using a combination of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Mudbox.  In Illustrator I traced the specific eye hole shape of a hockey mask I own that's molded from a studio original, and turned that into a stencil.  I used that stencil in Mudbox, along with a round hard brush, to map in all the holes for the opacity map.  I used Mudbox for this part of the texturing process so I could paint directly on the 3d normals, as my unwrap wasn't perfectly planar and had a little warping and stretching.  I also used Mudbox to create the red triangles for the diffuse texture.  In Photoshop, I duplicated the opacity map I'd created in Mudbox and with a little blurring, turned it into a displacement map.  Combined with the opacity, this gives the mask a little better than an illusion of depth.  With the exception of the red triangles, the texture map was painted entirely in Photoshop, using a combination of nice grunge images overlaid on a base color, and some nifty scratch and splatter blushes.  From the dirt map I was able to derive a specular/glossiness map, and with bump mapping was able to create scratches and chipped paint with real depth.

Happy with the results, I repeated the process to do a version of the mask with a different hole pattern, based primarily on the old Cooper HM7 street hockey mask that the original Jason mask was in part derived from to begin with.

Check out the results below.  I think the experiment came out pretty well.