Voldex / NFL Universe
A full modular helmet design system, delivered solo in ~14 hours as a paid test assignment for Voldex — the studio behind NFL Universe Football on Roblox.
The brief
Voldex sent over a paid test assignment for NFL Universe Football, one of the larger sports IPs on Roblox. The ask: design a helmet system that fits the platform’s tri-count and material budget, lands the NFL look, and lets players swap visors and repaint team colors on their own without a developer in the loop every time.
I had ~14 hours, calendar time, working solo. The deliverable wasn’t a helmet, it was a modular system players could operate in-game.
What I built
A complete modular helmet kit, broken into independently swappable parts:
- 3 base helmet shells with team-color bands
- 3 face mask styles (different bar configurations)
- 3 visor styles (clear, tinted, mirror)
- 3 final assembled variants demonstrating mix-and-match
- Decal-on-separate-mesh paintwork system, welded to the base in Roblox Studio
- Optimized UV layouts shared across the system
- ~2.7–2.9k tri budget per assembled helmet (mobile-class)
The modular system
Left to right: face mask shapes, base shells, full assembled variants, UV layouts. Each part is its own mesh with its own UV island, so it can be hot-swapped at runtime without re-baking textures or breaking the rest of the kit. The paintwork (logo, side stripe) sits on a separate decal mesh with its own UVs, welded to the helmet shell in Roblox Studio. A new team paint scheme is a texture change, not a model change.
Three final variants
Each one shown with its hero render, its wireframe, and its triangle count. All three sit inside the same ~2.8k tri budget despite the visible silhouette differences. The modular system carries the variation.
Turnaround
The full helmet system in motion. Same video I sent to Voldex with the deliverable.
Texturing in Substance Painter
A short capture from the Substance Painter session: team-color bands, the decal layer for paintwork, and the metal/plastic material split.
In Ilya’s words, at the time
“Just spent around 14 hours on @VoldexGames test assignment, haha, couldn’t stop myself. Have created the entire modular helmet design system for @NFLUniverseRBLX.”
“The cool part of this system is that players can customize helmets, change modular parts, visors, colors, and paintwork by themselves, without extra involvement from the dev side.”
“Just a paintwork decal example, created on a separate mesh with its own UVs, then welded to the main helmet base in Roblox Studio. This allows us to easily change logos, paintwork, etc., without touching the underlying model.”
What this demonstrates
- Working to a real studio brief at real studio velocity
- Modular thinking from day one. Not a one-off helmet, a system
- Roblox Studio fluency: weld-based decals, runtime part swapping, mobile-class budgets
- UV and topology discipline: ~2.8k tri budget per variant despite visible silhouette change
- Full ownership: design, model, UV, texture, in-engine assembly, turnaround render