Cruel shoes

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I'm getting fairly comfortable with the Chip Midnight / Robin Sojourner templates so I can make shirts and pants fairly easily, but shoes are still a complete mystery. Does anyone have any experience using the templates to design non-prim shoes? Say I have a pair of shoes I love so much that I want to put them on my avatar. I get a picture of them, pull up the photo and the lower body template in Gimp, and... there's just no way to match up the shape of the actual photo with the shape of the template. Toes that don't even come to much of a point are stretched out of proportion on the template, there's no real clue where top surface ends and sides begin... If I could see an example PSD with the shoe texture filled in, I could probably understand how to do the same with my own shoes.

[Chosen Few]

By "get a photo", I assume you mean you're taking your own photograph of your own pair of shoes, rather than just grabbing some random image off the Web, right?  Please respect copyright.

Even if it weren't for copyright issues, most photographs of shoes won't do you a whole lot of good anyway, as you've discovered. Most existing photos that are out there tend to be taken from the side, or from a 3/4 view, but the templates have the foot laid out partially as top/bottom, and partially as front/back.  From about the ankle down, it's top/bottom.  From there up, it's front/back.  If you want to do high tops, boots, etc., you need to break the shoe into pieces, across both areas.

Not that it can't be done, but it's quite a challenge to turn a side-view photo into an overhead view, let alone break it up accordingly if it's tall.  Generally speaking, it's a lot less work just to paint your own shoe, from scratch.

 

The easiest way to see how any part of the templates falls on the avatar is just to go ahead and wear the templates as clothing. If you're using Robin's templates, she's got colored areas, which are meant to help you identify what's what, as well as guide you in how the seams match up.  If you're using Chip's, he's got less colors in the default templates, so you might also want to take a look at his topography guide images. I'm not sure if these are still available publicly.  Here's the lower body one, in case they're not:

Blue areas face sideways, reds face frontward and backward, and greens face up and down.

 

You can also take a look at the avatar base skin files, which are in your SecondLife\character directory on your hard drive.  The one called lowebody_color.tga shows how the avatar's naked foot falls on the texture canvas.  From that, it's pretty easy to figure out what part of the shoe would go where, to cover the foot.

 

Don't expect to be able to create a very detailed shoe.  The entire upper foot area on the template at 512x512 (on-avatar resolution) is only about 120x200 pixels.  That's not a whole lot to work with.  This, along with the fact that the avatar foot just doesn't have a very nice shape, are the reasons why people started making prim shoes in the first place.

 

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By "get a photo" I mean with my digital camera, which in turn means I can get whatever angle works best. But from what you're telling me, that's not going to do a lot of good. Sigh. Thanks for explaining the limitations of the art so I can understand, anyway. Extra points for quoting from "Real Genius" :-)

[Shelby Silverspar]

Thanks so much for sharing Chip's topography map, Chosen! Would you mind posting the top and head portion of that map here as well?

[Lumbar Jaggernov]

here it is:

Female Topography Guide:CMFF

[Eloise Baily]

Thank you Lumbar but I can't see that image. Any chance you could post again please?