The Shoe is Shaping Up

After taking some time to let my hands recover from the madness of trying to get a shoe ready for the benefit I was finally able to get back to work refining the Bow Shoe.

While working on the shoe for Mabb’s benefit I really wasn’t happy with how the texturing came out. In particular I lost a great deal of detail when the texture uploaded and was applied to the shoe. Instead of a rich suede it looked more like a felt. Also the stitching just wasn’t up to snuff.

Accordingly this week I split the single material UV I used for Mabb’s shoe into 3 materials and 3 UV’s which allowed me to make the texturable area larger on each UV permitting a much finer grain on the suede as can be seen in this snapshot.

I also found a marvelous tutorial online for doing stitching using paths in photoshop. That tutorial can be found here:

http://digitalscrapbookplace.com/university/tutorials/ps_stitching.shtml

The final problem tackled this week was getting an ankle lock script/animation working so that when the avatar moves the leg doesn’t cut through the strap of the shoe. I found the script on the wiki at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/AnkleLock  unfortunately I could not get the animation on that page to upload properly to Second Life. I ended up breaking out my old copy of Poser and making my own animation.

So a busy week but big progress has been made.

Welcome and a Shoe in progress

Welcome to my first Blog. I am hoping in the weeks ahead to document my journey into Mesh content creation for Second Life. I hope to be able to document my progress both in the technical aspects of blender and as a business person within Second Life.

To start I would like to show you a shoe I have been working on

The basic modeling is nearly finished though I am not 100% happy with the bow yet. The colors shown are just place holder colors to help me see the various parts of the shoe. I am actively working on unwrapping to get a good UV map and the fun of texturing will begin.