Need tips on sculpted shoes

Hello Everyone,

I have been combing the world wide web for clues to the mysterious, arcane, and hush hush world of sculpted prim shoes. So far I have found nothing that gives any tips on the process of sculptie shoe construction.

Is there anything out there? Or am I just not looking in the right spot?

I am using Blender 2.48 but if anyone has info on another program like Maya or 3D max that would be wonderful!

Should I use Domino's sculpty meshes? If so which one?
Is there a different method entirely?

I have watched all the machinimatix vid tuts and I have bought and read the Essential Blender Manual!

Now I am experimenting with the plane mesh to create the different parts of the heel. Am i moving in the right direction?

By all means, use Domino's meshes. I'm not sure I would do much of anything with the plane type on a shoe (although I suppose anything is possible.)

I might actually start with tokoroten to get a basic shape and then import it into blender.

The trick to any sculptie is being able to see where you want the detail and knowing which shape will do that the best. So for shoes, where it's pretty much a one sided affair (ie it's only the display version that needs an inside) you'll generally be using either a torus or a cylinder for the part around the ankle, and a plane for the toes. If it's a boot, then another cylinder or torus for the shin part. Personally I'd stick to cylinders and planes and skip the inside altogether, if you do use a torus, then you'll want to keep the inside to 1 or 2 8ths so the majority of modeling detail is available for the outside.

With any attachments, it's worth grabbing the avatar blend file so you can model your sculpties around it. Apart from that, any specific tips would depend on the type of shoe you were doing

Obviously the amount of prims comes into play as well.. To do a 1 prim shoe, your only real option is the plane. 2 prims perhaps a cylinder and a plane, 3 a cylinder and 2 planes (cylinder for ankle, planes for toes and sole). When you model from the LOD 1 upwards, it's a lot easier to plan these details.

A plane has 4 edges of 8 lines, a cylinder has 2 loops of 8 sides, sphere and torus have no edges. So for multipart sculpties, cylinders and planes are usually the best options and once you decide how to join their edges, often everything else will fall into place.

Wow thank you both Renee and Domino!

I had a few follow up questions.

Is 1024 faces the exact number i must have to export my sculptie? No more or less?

And the size of the sculptie texture when saved must be at 64x64? Or does the size of the texture determine the size of the sculpty inworld? so 1024x1024 texture = a really big sculpt prim; 64x64 texture = a really small sculpt prim.

The size of the sculptie is not dependent on the size of the sculpt-map. The sculptie size can be modified inworld by adjusting x,y,z in the prim editor.

Please be aware: The standard viewer allows only sculpties with 1024 faces and sculptmaps which contain 32*32 faces.

depending on what sculpt type you have, this means in count of vertices:

33*33 vertices for planes
33*32 vertices for cylinder and sphere
32*32 vertices for torus

the difference comes from the different stitching types:

plane: no stitching at all
cylinder: stiched at one side
sphere: stitched at one side, the poles shifted together to 1 point
torus: stitched at both sides

Domino's sculpt maps always use 64*64 pixels. I am not sure, how exactly this technically maps to the vertex counts i mentioned above for the different stitching types. But still, only the amount of vertices as mentioned above is actually derived from the sculptmaps. In simple words: whatever sculptmap-size you supply, the viewer always shrinks down to the vertex count i mentioned above depending on the stitching type.

All what i have said so far is valid for the standard viewer. The RC-viewer can do other face counts. Now sculpt maps do not need to be square, but can be rectangular. All supported UV face counts are (as far as i know) supported by Domino's RC-scripts. But as far as i know, even the RC-viewer does not allow for more than 1024 faces in total.

If you want to keep compatible with the standard viewer, only use sculpties with 1024 faces. Hence Domino's scripts and 64*64 sculptmap size is most probably what you want