So I’m trying to make a helmet that has a similar design to this:
As you can see, there’s some ridges in the back, and they kind of wrap around the edge of the holes. I’m wondering how I would extrude shapes like that out of a sphere.
Attachments
You’'ll need to make a series of parallel edges on the sphere in that area and then extrude them out.
I made this super quickly so it’s not accurate nor clean by any stretch of the imagination, however the principles are the same… Start with a Round Cube and use Proportional Editing to scale the sphere to the dimensions of the helmet reference. Slide the edges on the middle segment so that they conform to the pattern at the back of the helmet. Then simply use the Knife tool to cut the face area, do some more edge-sliding and poly pushing and then model out the back detail. It’s just a matter of pushing the verts around, that’s all.
Here’s what I made in 5 minutes.
My advice is to abandon this workflow of poly-modeling details streight over a base mesh, cause topology will become
very dirty and unmanageable at some point.
I suggest you to create a base mesh of the helmet without the details, then sculpt details, then retopo following the details lines to have a good topology.
To model the base mesh, I suggest you to use the sphere primitive mesh just as a shape reference, in other words I suggest you to not try to edit the sphere.
I don’t think that’s good advice, sorry. How do you suppose people model vehicles and large hard-surface assets, it’s usually always by poly-modelling something. When you have a good understanding of hard-surface and topological techniques then it’s almost always possible to get easily attainable results. Remember, when you sculpt something and retopologize over the mesh it’s almost always never going to be as accurate as modelling it directly.
I don’t disagree with you, however in this instance it’s not the best idea… I mean Ubisoft recently used ZBrush and Dynamesh to rapidly prototype weapons for The Division. So it’s certainly not wrong…
However I think it’s more beneficial to the OP to try and poly-model the helmet.
If you give me a day I’ll model this helmet fully and show you it’s perfectly possible to do by editing a base-mesh.