And im sure those of you who make renders and such of the chief run into problems; regardless of how souped up you can make your chief (as seen below), those details seem unreachable. (There's no working modifier to achieve the above effects properly.)
And so I've decided to write a tutorial on how to get the edges to look accurate to the image shown earlier.
The first step is to acquire an original masterchief helmet from halo 2 with no smoothing groups for current visual reference as seen here:
Using the "mesh smooth" modifier your results show up with holes and errors in them, and even after 1 iteration the edges still aren't the type of smooth we're looking for.
The problem here is that meshsmooth basically lops off the corners into a blob of a mesh. However we don't want the remainder of the face that should be flat to be rounder too early. Faces that we want flat need extra vertices at the edges, to retain their... flatness
.
VS.
Alright let's start placing vertices where we need 'em:
Now that we have the vertices placed lets delete and then relink the dependent faces back to the new vertices:
Now we have successfully prepared these two faces to make their transformation properly through the meshsmooth modifier as seen in the smooth to rounded diagrams shown above.
Finally we can apply the mesh smooth modifier:
The only downsides to this method is that it is extremely time consuming and it doesn't keep the original uv's for the model. Otherwise if someone wants to tackle the whole helmet, by all means. The finished product should look very close to what the first example picture looked like.
Cheers,
-Oddball-