Create and it will come...
...eh, what does that mean?
It was a few years ago I decided that I needed to diversify my skill set, having worked in the aviation sector for over 2 decades I needed to refine my skillset.
Creating training materials for complex systems such as surveillance drones, helicopter maintenance and civil aviation training is quite complicated. With that, it also has a limited market, especially as the blue chip companies want to create their own internal teams. As a one man band I wouldn't get a look in, this realisation around 2015 meant I had to change, I had to adapt.
Fortunately, I am quite motivated, and always looking to create, when I'm not doing 3D I will be dabbling with Ableton Live, and when I'm in my moments of free time, I will spend time with my gorgeous family (sometimes gorgeous when not bickering with 2 females).
Anyways, I'm heading off a trouble path with that last sentence!
I think it was around early 2018 where I wanted to create an on-line tool to customise a shoe, but the initial build up was to create the actual 3D shoe.
I never created a shoe before, I had some fundamental knowledge on creating organic matter.
Below is the final render (one Sunday afternoon updating to use Redshift).
A shoe is actually quite complicated! And this was a basic shoe, not your sports shoe with bridge support, etc, etc...
I had to start somewhere so this was a google search for "Vans shoe". Ahhh, it is probably the easiest shoe to model. Phew.
Like any model, edge loops, got to think about edge loops. If you have bad geometry in areas, then you will be in a world of pain!
The premise here, keep the geometry low; this helps when it comes to the UV process, think of it where the 3D model has to be laid out as a flat piece of material.
On the left, the 3D geometry is flattened:
A rudimentary test, UV grid applied to see if there are any distortions.
Happy with that, next phase, throw a fabric texture onto the surface.
The above model has been slightly refined but the initial test model can be seen below in a real-time environment. I was concerned with geometry at the time so I even hand painted the seams / stitching using Substance Painter.
I even created a very basic Unity piece based on this shoe (with minor adjustments to the geometry).
So I covered quite a few disciplines with this shoe, modelling, texturing, thinking about how to get it running (excuse the pun) in a different render engine (real-time).
Going back to the title, "Create and it will come..."
"it" referring to "they", "future prospects", "future developments", that's your choice of wording...
...for me I landed my first commercial shoe gig a little later that year, an agency down the road from me commissioned me to model the Black Panther shoe.
Now that was complicated, the sole had to built from scratch, it also comprised of 3 different parts being a trigenic shoe. The upper wasn't exactly straight forward either, the shoe had very little or no symmetry at all!
I also had to ensure I could export the model for use with C4D and be able to animate parts of that said model.
That might lead to another blog as I used MODO's Mesh Fusion for creating 95% of the sole.
If you got to the end, many thanks for reading, and stay safe during this C-19 pandemic. There seems to be a glimmer of hope, YAY!