Stormtrooper Helmet
"All right, men. Load your weapons!"
Probably one of the most iconic helmets of the silver screen. Originally designed by famous Ralph McQuarrie, and sculpted by Liz Moore and Nick Pemberton.
Houdini 20.5 came with an updated Sculpt SOP, which until now I didn’t have an opportunity to test out. Having acquired Dominik Lange’s excellent SDF Modeler addon for the program, and a similarly impressive Alexey Vanzhula’s Modeler 2025, I wanted to try out the combination of the three in some traditional destructive sculpting and modeling process inside Houdini.
As I was looking for a challenge, I decided that the stormtrooper helmet, with its mixture of hard surface and organic shapes, and widely known appearance, would be a perfect choice for this endeavor.
Sculpting, retopo, subdivision modeling and composition were accomplished in Houdini. The only thing that was not, are the textures, which I found faster to paint in Substance Painter (single 4K UDIM) than to construct in Copernicus, which was in Beta stage at the time of asset creation.
The model is featured on Modeler for Houdini channel on YouTube.
Tools
Houdini Substance Painter