Hey folks, I think I'm just about done with this project, modelled, mapped rigged and all. Almost ready to release it (as I said before, it will be a freebie)
I would like to ask if someone would be kind and give them a quick test drive, and let me know if everything works the way it's supposed to?  If you feel up to it, please email me your contact info at conniekat8@yahoo.com, or a PM in here

I have been meaning to mention this to you for awhile now, You did a tremendous job on htis. Many of us have been commenting about these shows and they are the tops. Kudos.

Stunning work Conniekat8!!

Terrific! I'd love to test drive them.
cheerio  lululee

These are beautifully modeled. How generous to release them as a freebie! I wish I could model shoes but all I've managed so far is simple slippers. Did you first model the shoe and then fit it to the foot, or did you build it around the foot as you modeled?

Excellent shoes - wow - those laces must have been quite a job. Would you like to make a tutorial? ;)

Wow!

Quote - I have been meaning to mention this to you for awhile now, You did a tremendous job on htis. Many of us have been commenting about these shoes and they are the tops. Kudos.

Oooh, Tank You Anton :)
I'm trying to work up to some decent quality... before I model some stuff for Apollo. I'd hate to make crappy outfits for such a high class figure :D

Well, I better reply to everyone in one instead of making a bunch of different posts :)
I'm tickled you guys like them!

I do have several people that volunteered to test them out, thak you sooo much. I'm pretty handy at modeling and texturing, but this is my first serious attempt at rigging and packaging up files, so feedback on improvements I meed to make would be wonderful.

I neglected to mention that the shoe is for V3 - so far. As soon as I get handier at rigging, I'm hoping to make a version for few other figures, at least V4 and Aiko, as it seems these are getting some requests.

Tutorial... laces.. heh....   To answer couple of questions, I modelled the shoe around the foot, but in order to make the shoe little more believable, I ignored the foot in few areas. For example, the toes on V3 will need to be turned OFF. Or squeezed the way pointy shoes usually squeeze the toes. (For me it's easier to just turn them off)
I've modelled and UV mapped the whole thing in Hexagon. I'm really getting to dig that little program. The modelling tools are rather slick.

Shoelaces were not nearly as hard as they look. Here's a quick overview of how I made them (I'm using some modelling language here for brevity) 
First I used a simple line (a straight one, not even a curvy spline, to lace through the main shape, then I extruded the line into a ribbon, then gave this extruded ribbon a thickness, then smoothed it out, so the rectangular... thing... became a tube. With dynamic geometry on, hexagon still remembers that simple original line that I snaked through (cage), so when the time comes to fit the laces to the holes, you start pushing pulling adding and subtracting vertices to the cage till it looks acceptable. 

I'll put a more detailed tutorial on my to-do list, but there's no telling when I may get to it. I bet someone has already written one ;)

LOL, I have to say 'acceptable', if I waited till I'm actually happy with it, it would never get done. It seems I'm never happy with stuff I make, and only see things I could have done better.

Again, thanks so much for noticing them! :)

You did a tremdous job on these! :biggrin:

Fantastic job, and in Hexagon too! I have Hexagon lying somewhere in the bowels of my computer, and I have't a clue how to use it! A tute would be terrific! Thanks for offering the shoes as a freebie, very generous of you!

Those are terrific!!!! I can't wait to see Vicky strutting around in those :)

Impressive!

Looking fantastic Conniekat8 !!

Wow! Very well done conniekat8!
I'm such a noob with hexagon, i could only model an eyelet for the lace ;)  LOL

Amazing work...these look almost exactly like some we have in our local museum and living history site.  Well done.

These shoes are beautifully done. Congratulations! And thank you for sharing them with us.

Gorgeous shoes!! Cannnot hardly wait to have them! Thank you!

That's some great modelling, fantastic work Connie!

Now the nasty question... how's the polycount?

I'll be releasing LOD1 and LOD2. LOD1, which is the modelling cage seems to be too coarse, but if people decide they want it, I may share that too.

When I make the rest of the outfit, I'll probably tinker with the polycount more and try to optimize it more. Right now I don't want to hold up releasing the freebie much longer.

The original texture is 2000x2000 pixels. If someone wants it smaller, that could be done with any program that will resize a jpeg.

Very nice. Blows my spool heels for the kids out of the water!

Ah, I was afraid you'd say that. It explains why they look so well! It's always the same, really nice shoes take a LOT of polys to look detailed.

Oh well, at least it makes me feel better that the latest pair of pants I modelled was around the 20K polys after adding all the seams and wrinkles in the fabric :)

Think that's bad? I've been doing a detailed drum kit and the kick alone is weighing in at 30K. Wait 'till you try dynamic drapery. Takes a lot of polys to get the stuff to drape well, and you can't really optimize them (although I have been thinking along those lines already...building in more mesh on the places where I want more folding to occur). I think the poly count on those shoes looks reasonable. And I really love the LOD -- I wish more people would do it.

Yeah, LOD is easy to do, at least the way I have my workflow set up. All I have to do is set the smoothing level to 0, 1 or 2 in hexagon when exporting.

I'm calling it LOD, as a throwback to the Level Of Detail used in gaming, and something i use in terrain modeling and simulations at work, I'm not sure if there's a better term for it in the world of poser and character modeling.

nomuse: ask around, you'll see that a lot of people balk at that sort of poly counts. I know I was told by a few people that 20K was "way too much" and that I needed to optimise my mesh. And then I started texturing boots made by someone else that were weighting in at around 40K :) So this really isn't that bad, but when a full human figure can be had for 100K, you'll hear comments about it.

Connie, it might be a good idea to also offer the 5K one for animation; it might be quite usable for long-shots, and with Poser's smoothing option it might work quite well.

I vote for LOD...same ancestry, and it seems to work for this usage. A couple models ago I had a robot that was a pretty light 8K or so, but, for use in such things as giant robot army scenes I did a part-for-part replacement with simplified and optimized parts to get it down to a third of that. I called that the "LOD2" version (and was thinking of adding a LOD3 at 800 polys or so!) Pity we can't animate a LOD function as well as game engines do, but is definitely useful for Poser. Also smaller tex maps...I reduce most of mine, using the smaller ones for all but those face close-ups.

Quote - Connie, it might be a good idea to also offer the 5K one for animation; it might be quite usable for long-shots, and with Poser's smoothing option it might work quite well.

I was thinking about it, but when I import it into Poser, it is so coarse that the pieces of the shoe don't fit together any more. I'd have to remodle the whole thing to get some sort of a compromise between LOD0 and LOD1. If you'd like to check it out, I'll let you have the OBJ.

Frankly I didn't have animation in mind when modeling this, so it will be a limited use product. Heh, I don't think low poly modeling is going to be my specialty. I'm more into digital painting and stills then animation.

Yah...I noticed the design; it appears the parts aren't welded. Have had similar problem posing a shoe with a separate sole. Is a real pain modeling so everything is connected, but often necessary when it needs to bend organically. I still think they look good and it doesn't look like too heavy a poly count.

on the left is 80° smoothing angle, on the right is the model with no Poser smoothing applied. 
The way I modelled it was for things to be in place when smoothed out in hexagon, which works pretty similar to polygon tessalation. In this particular case smoothing was done with Catmull-clark subdivision algorithm.

Once rigged they bend okay, things are welded together on export. The pokethroughs look the same in the modeling program and in poser. The original was just modelled that coarsely to stat with. I didn't thing it being that rough it would be useable for anyone?

Wow!!! Briliant!

These look wonderful - look forward to them!!  Thanks :)

Therte's a texture map template in there, for you whom wanted to make textures for it.
I included two LOD's, lower and higher version (LOD1 and LOD2)

I'll put some more detail into the freebies Forum thread :)

These are stunning Connie!

By far the highest quality freebie I've seen in a long time (Apollo doesn't count).

In fact, I've seen shoes in the Marketplace that weren't half as great as these!

I might just have to dust V3 off for one last hurrah!

They are fantastic, looking forward to their release! Thank you for sharing with us for free! :)

Thank you very much Conniekat8!  They are beautiful!

You're welcome guys!  I just got a notice that it's been approved and it's now available in rendo's freestuff!
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/index.php?user_id=208429

(can I post a link to our freestuff here, or does it need to point to the freestuf forum first? I'm not sure how the rule goes? Hope this is okay?)

I would LOVE to see what people make with it!

I'm off to buy food right now, but I have downloaded them and will try them out later today. I'm very excited!  Thanks so much :)