Sneakers (work in progress) (Patreon)

I've tried my hand at making some shoes in Blender. Fugazi and I were talking about releasing the Caryl Outfit as a product for G8 and G9, but it wouldn't be complete without perhaps a Fitbit type smart watch thing and a good pair of shoes. I had never done any vertex modelling from references, let alone shoes, but I really liked the process.

I followed a very chill tutorial by Blue Inversion and learnt a lot about modelling in Blender. My first attempt worked out OK, but to really drive things home I tried it a second time from memory. This worked out even better, and I decided to leave out the eyelets as they ruined the topology. I did a couple of renders, first with default materials from Daz Studio, then spent a few more hours trying to come up with something in Substance Painter, which opened up another can of worms - but I prevailed.

I was particularly impressed with how the new Genesis 9 figure handles shoe rigging. If you've ever tried either rigging your own shoes, or retro fit existing ones for G8 and earlier, distortions and weirdness are commonplace. G9 has a new footwear template that excludes the toes from the process, making it so much easier. All I had to do was a small touch up on the bend using the Weight Map brush, but that took seconds. High heels will get their own template soon, so woohoo!

This week I'm working on a new mini series for Daz, which I'm hoping to wrap up by Friday. There's also a Substance Painter video in the works, and the high-res renders from the recent public Daz stream in which we created Greta together. I'll have those for you later today.

Have a wonderful week!