Boot WIP #4

Ok, well it’s the New Year! And I promise to try to be more efficient with my time. But I’ll be honest, It’s not always easy 😀

Right now I find myself distracted by a lot of things, but I try to make sure one of those things is my project. I did kind of get off on a tangent, with something for personal use:

Expect to see it and a few others probably over the next weeks. (they are fun and rather easy to do.) But that’s not what you’re here about is it?

So Where am I on the boot? About here:

I finally got around to fixing my tread pattern, and tidied up the line of the heel, rounded it a bit, and started working up around the foot. I also had to get the skeleton involved so I get my bendy parts at the right joint areas of the leg.  Those with Eagle-Eyes probably notice,  “Hey the foot is sticking way out above the shoe!”  And yes that’s true. Because a heel like this does give you some extra height. While there’s a few ways I could have handled this, I opted to use the Shoe Layer/Foot Shaper like traditional shoes use, for one very important reason.

It will make the shoe to floor distance adjustable by adjusting the shoe layer. This is a better option that basically hard baking a distance, as different avatars are likely to need different distances to the floor.  A little forethought wins the day!

Now I bet some also see the start of some of the folds on the top there, and wonder, how do you get that? Well, theres a few ways certainly.  In previous posts, I talked about some experiments with “Cloth Simulation“.  And that’s good for many things, however, in this instance, as you can see, the shoe doesn’t really match the shape of the foot/leg and also i find the cloth sim to be a little too aggressive and touchy for this kind of close-fitting application. So it has to be done by hand. It’s a little tedious, but not that hard. here’s the basic steps:

1) Start with a simple shape. In this case a Cylinder. Imagine it’s an arm or a leg.  You need to have a fair # of loops going around to get the proper amount of detail. Obviously the more the better detail-wise, but for SL you definitely don’t want to go overboard and make a laggy mess. ^.^

2) Keep in mind, a fold in fabric is simply the bunching and moving of fabric where it bends or where gravity or its own stiffness compresses it. You have to think about how fabric would behave, or use photos from the real world that illustrate how this occurs. then it’s just a matter of moving loops (or in some cases individual vertices) to re-create this. In some places the material would be displaced out, some places in, some places bunched up, some places taut.

3) Taking the horizontal loops, you can angle and move them, expand or contract them to form folds or wrinkles.

4) A few more and things start to take shape. You can add several at opposing angles, and at various rotations around, and as you see when viewed in solid mode, it starts to look pretty convincing.

One of many wrinkle references I use

Of course it needs more tweaking but for this example, you get the idea. 🙂

Until Next Week 🙂

– Dari