Sculptie shoe diary

I thought I’d share a bit of my experimentation and learning this week. The few snapshots here represent a good solid week of practice; they don’t show the many trials, missteps, and hours of fighting desperately with texture baking in between. The texture bakes are still stomping my ass.

Standard prims make shoe construction much easier in some ways. Their limits constrain the design space so much that choices are much easier to make.  Maybe in time I’ll get more comfortable with sculptie design but right now the possibilities are wonderful and scary!

Anyway, on to the stuff…I started with replicating the basic shape of my Old Boots, then decided to wait on making calf and foot align well and played with a simple 2 prim upper. I added a crude 1 prim sole to both. Up close it looked pretty bad. The tan texture is a semi-successful bake. It went downhill from there.

 I next added a 2 prim heel/sole to the tan shoe. I was pretty pleased with the smoothness of it. My shaping skills still need some work though.

Just for the hell of it I worked on a new single prim upper. The old boot replica foot was also a single prim but it’s quite different from this one in the details. I also made a new, only slightly less crude single prim sole/heel. I’m not happy with this upper shape (for instance, look at the texture stretching on the heel) but I learned a whole lot from it. You can see my texture baking start to go downhill here.

Finally, last night I worked on a clog. My shaping techniques are getting more efficient.  The upper is progressing nicely. The single prim sole is clearly the wrong choice for it.  I tried texture baking with mentalRay because I saw this: http://www.qarl.com/qLab/?p=22.  My texture makes me want to cry. I’ll continue researching lighting and rendering this weekend.

That’s it for now. P.S. If anyone has a simple answer for why neither my Convert to File Texture nor my mentalRay batch bakes match what I see in my test renders, I’ll give you my firstborn or some candy or something.

UPDATE: I just discovered ‘orthogonal reflection’ for texture baking, which helps quite a bit. I have no idea why the inside of the clog renders with really high luminance though.