> Real, not invented.  The shoe is by Naturalizer and is entitled "Canary"

I had a look with google (for example:
http://www2.shopping.com/xPC-Naturalizer-Naturalizer-Women-s-Canary-Ankle-Strap-Sandala

),
  and I was surprised to see that this shoe is not an expensive  "luxury 
shoe". I guess I had this "luxury" feeling because your render is such a 
luxury render :-)


tuabiht

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Charles C wrote:
> This looks like it could go up to billboard size and still look like a
> photo.  In fact, I can imagine putting a department store name next to it
> and it being an acutal billboard :)   The stitching looks wonderful.
> Charles
> 
I wish, but no, this would not sustain much more in the way of 
resolution.  It is amazing how much work it takes just to get to this 
level.  As usual I am torn between taking it to the next level or 
getting on to some of the other projects that interest me.  Best for me 
to take mesh modelling incrementally though, or I burn out.

To get to the next level I would need to:

-add more detail to the mesh to further reflect the actual construction 
of the shoe.  The sense of the separate layers of leather folded and 
stitched, and the irregularity of the stitching especially around the joins,

-get a richer and more accurate portrayal of the leather texture.  This 
would involve most likely UV mapping the texture to the surface which 
would add serious levels of complexity to my workflow, and improving the 
actually look of the leather texture.

-improve the stitching so that the actual tuck of the thread against the 
leather looked and felt more real.  Right now it is just approximated 
with little scaled torii.  Of the things listed here, this is probably 
the most easily doable part, though again the irregular parts would be 
more demanding.

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Janet wrote:
> Amazing job! It's so detailed, the stitching looks fantastic. And I like
> that shiny red leather too.
> 
:)
With Jaime's lighting set up I am hoping to get a good version in black 
leather too.  Black leather was always the hardest to paint, also.

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St. wrote:
>   Gulp! You've done another one Jim. Will you please tone it down a little? 
> It's making me reach for my Wings shortcut.  ;)
> 
>    Jokes aside, that's absolutely fantastic! You know I like my modelling 
> Jim, and well, that image just beats the pants off me for modelling, 
> artistic, and probably technical too.
> 
>       How did you do the stitching? One model duplicated several hundred(?) 
> times?
> 
>       (Before sending this, I just looked at it again, and I'll repeat the 
> gulp).
> 
> 

Y'all are embarrassing me.  But the compliments are much, much 
appreciated.  It looks like a simple enough model of a fairly modest 
shoe but it still took a remarkable amount of work.  'Took three tries 
of three separate strategies before I could get a version of the toe 
webbing that was even close!  The joins at the sole and the joins where 
the stitching crosses were reworked in several ways.

The stitching is actually approximated with little torii, scaled to look 
like little flat loops. They are oriented along splines which track the 
bottom of the creases for the stitching, which line the edges of the 
straps, and are physically modelled into the mesh.  The splines are 
generated by calculating the midpoints of the polys which form the floor 
of the crease prior to final smoothing.  These polys can be exported 
from Wings, as you know, ("export selected,") but as you may also 
realize, they cannot be exported into any set order along a path. 
Without the points in a coherent order along a path they cannot be used 
to generate a useful spline.  At first I tried sorting the polys along 
one of the dimensional components, x, y, or z.  This could work as long 
as the paths were exported in segments which did not turn back on 
themselves in the dimension.  Then I hit apon a method which seems 
obvious enough once you  think of it.  If I exported the polys in 
contiguous bands, each poly sharing vertices with the next, it was easy 
enough to reorder them like a string of adjoining dominos by searching 
for shared vertices.  All I needed to do was mark one ending poly with a 
separate texture.  So that is what I did.  I do the reordering with a 
little script in Python. The method is obviously tedious, of course, 
when it comes to manually selecting and exporting some 53 different 
paths from Wings.  (And I am still not finished, the interior stitching 
of the toe webbing is yet to be done.) Also the path of the spline does 
not adhere exactly to the surface of the smoothed mesh and there is the 
perenial problem with the roll of objects when they are oriented to a 
twisting spline.  I believe there are ways to correct this, though, when 
I get up the energy for a second pass.

The best in all of this was the ease with which I could get presentable 
renders of what I have, so far, with little set up effort using Jaime's 
includes and lighting system.  That would have been the fatal straw 
otherwise.  I hope to try some of the light dome systems also.

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Jim Charter <jrc### [at] msncom> wrote:
> Janet wrote:
> > Amazing job! It's so detailed, the stitching looks fantastic. And I like
> > that shiny red leather too.
> >
> :)
> With Jaime's lighting set up I am hoping to get a good version in black
> leather too.  Black leather was always the hardest to paint, also.
Well, I hope you do get a good black one. With red stitching??
Happy Birthday Jim, what's your sign? (giggle)

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Janet wrote:
> Jim Charter <jrc### [at] msncom> wrote:
> 
>>Janet wrote:
>>
>>>Amazing job! It's so detailed, the stitching looks fantastic. And I like
>>>that shiny red leather too.
>>>
>>
>>:)
>>With Jaime's lighting set up I am hoping to get a good version in black
>>leather too.  Black leather was always the hardest to paint, also.
> 
> Well, I hope you do get a good black one. With red stitching??
> Happy Birthday Jim, what's your sign? (giggle)
> 


Tanks, 55 :0,  Taurus, on the cusp of Gemini

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Jim Charter wrote:

> little script in Python. The method is obviously tedious, of course, 
> when it comes to manually selecting and exporting some 53 different 
> paths from Wings.  (And I am still not finished, the interior stitching 
> of the toe webbing is yet to be done.)

Great result, but it sounds like a maintenance nightmare ;)

Did you consider the reverse approach, i.e. defining or modelling
the splines and generating leather bands using a macro or similar?
You'd probably need a second spline for the "orientation". Come to
think of it, does anybody know of a tool for modelling 3D splines?

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Christian Froeschlin wrote:
> Jim Charter wrote:
> 
>> little script in Python. The method is obviously tedious, of course, 
>> when it comes to manually selecting and exporting some 53 different 
>> paths from Wings.  (And I am still not finished, the interior 
>> stitching of the toe webbing is yet to be done.)
> 
> 
> Great result, but it sounds like a maintenance nightmare ;)
At least a serious workflow consideration.  But with mesh modelling, 
workflow, meaning the order of steps, is always crucial.  There is very 
little ability to go backwards.  Best to save many copies of your work 
so that you can return to some point and redirect your strategy from 
there. So yes, maintenance in the broad sense is something you must 
always treat with care in the mesh world.  For instance I have yet to 
come up with a dependable nomenclature for tracking all the various 
branchings my models take.


> 
> Did you consider the reverse approach, i.e. defining or modelling
> the splines and generating leather bands using a macro or similar?
> You'd probably need a second spline for the "orientation". Come to
> think of it, does anybody know of a tool for modelling 3D splines?

Most advanced tools I believe would do that.  Perhaps Silo, not sure 
about Blender, Rhino, one would think, certainly the professional tools. 
  It is a limitation of Wings that you can only export polys.  But 
really, that can be worked around with the Python scripts, which once 
written, make it easy.  The tedium comes with the manual nature of the 
export.  But that would be similar even if you could build and export 
paths as splines or even sequences of verts.  The work comes really from 
the amount of detail in the subject itself.

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"Jim Charter" <jrc### [at] msncom> schreef in bericht 
news:465b8396$1@news.povray.org...
>> Did you consider the reverse approach, i.e. defining or modelling
>> the splines and generating leather bands using a macro or similar?
>> You'd probably need a second spline for the "orientation". Come to
>> think of it, does anybody know of a tool for modelling 3D splines?
>
> Most advanced tools I believe would do that.  Perhaps Silo, not sure about 
> Blender, Rhino, one would think, certainly the professional tools. It is a 
> limitation of Wings that you can only export polys.  But really, that can 
> be worked around with the Python scripts, which once written, make it 
> easy.  The tedium comes with the manual nature of the export.  But that 
> would be similar even if you could build and export paths as splines or 
> even sequences of verts.  The work comes really from the amount of detail 
> in the subject itself.

I can confirm: Silo can model 3D splines very easily. In my image "Cathy's 
World #2" (the one in the dark tunnel), the curving tunnel was built using a 
spline.

Thomas

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Jim Charter wrote:

> With Jaime's lighting set up I am hoping to get a good version in black
> leather too.  Black leather was always the hardest to paint, also.

But NOT black PATENT!! ... IIRC :)

Very nice. I read through the thread about the work that went into the
model. If it were easy, I suppose every model would look like this.

I went back and looked at your object study shots recently when
commenting on an object study render in the RTC. This shot looks very
casual in comparison to what you have posted before in the "genre". Not
at all like your previously posted black pointy shoes which evinced the
same reverential feel as your religious and ceremonial object renders.

 -Shay

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