A feature I always wanted to explore in Blender was procedual texturing. As a exercise I decided to create a mk IV diving helmet inspired model, because I needed something to texture anyway and just downloading someone elses work is borring. To ensure the best possible mapping I made the topology as clean as possible.

Surface imperfections are one of the key properties your material should have. In the real world almost no surface is perfect. There are tiny scratches in glass, metals and even perfect looking mirrors. For my materials to look like they do now I layerd a ton of different modiefied noise and wave textures to keep everything procedual.

The most difficult thing to texture was probably the rope on the chest. After trying a few different approaches a slightly distorted Wavetexture seemd to do the trick. I also pluged it into the displacement which gave the rope a more dimensional look. As a bit of a bonus I added a particle system to create the finer strands.

At this stage I was happy with the state of the materials, but what bothered me was that most helmets I used as a template were used ones. I decided to make an extra material which looked really weathered. And so the second rendering came to be. I will probably make some scenes of it lying on the ocean floor.