Shoe settings

[Anna Nova]

Since SL gave us the easy-to-change hover height adjustment, shoe designers have slowly stopped including shoebase objects in with their creations.  But I like them for ease in which they can added as part of an outfit.  So usually end up making my own.  The way I do it is to add a new shoe, and then edit it's parameters, the important ones seem to be Heel Height and Platform Height.   But I don't truly understand them.  Can some kind soul point me at a proper explanation?

Edit:  I should add that, to avoid the effects of floors being made wrong with the physics below or above the plane, I do my shoe fitting on the sea-floor at Z=0, and on Linden ground.

On top of that, when I change the setting and then close the edit, SL changes the hover height again, so the carefully set hover is now wrong.  This results in a process of going round and round until I get something that works.  Why is this happening and is there a workflow that prevents it?

Edited December 29, 2017 by anna2358
explain where I do the fitting

[angeoco]

The system shoe settings deform your feet into a shoe shape, complete with the platform and heel that you set. (Then, ugh, people used to texture/paint that to make it look like an actual shoe ...) Then you can add an alpha which makes the platform and heel invisible, so that your feet are floating above the ground, and you can cover them with mesh/sculpt shoes. Or add a full-body alpha and a mesh body, which also floats above the ground.

Then, if you set a "hover height", it gives you even more height, regardless of what you are wearing.

Edited December 29, 2017 by angeoco

[Klytyna]

13 hours ago, anna2358 said:

shoe designers have slowly stopped including shoebase objects in with their creations

There's a good reason for that...

For example, if you buy high heel shoes for a Maitreya, they generally WON'T include a shoebase because... You already have one, it's supplied with your Maitreya, a high heel foot shoebase. They only include an additional shoe base if for example, the shoe in addition to being a high heel/high foot, also has a substantial platform sole.

Fetishistic shoes with 4 inch platforms, and 10 inch heels, include shoebases, so do ballet point thigh boots and ponygirl hooves, but your generic Vanilla strappy high heel won't.

As for problems with 'hover heights changing' when you come out of appearance edit, that's probably because you still have the 'use appearance edit pose when editing appearance' option enabled, when you finish editing, it finishes using the pose, and you return to your normal AO poses.
 

[LittleMe Jewell]

I just keep that Hover Height slider at the top of my screen and adjust as needed.

[Morgan Rosenstar]

21 hours ago, anna2358 said:

The way I do it is to add a new shoe, and then edit it's parameters, the important ones seem to be Heel Height and Platform Height. 

They don't change your hover height but we can use them as a trick to modify our overall height, then combined with an alpha it looks like we're adding some hover inches. Depending on the shoes I'm wearing I'm editing these values to modify my height and added to an alpha it looks like I'm closer or higher above the ground which is a trick good enough to adjust the hover height of my avatar (as pictured by @angeoco ).

[Anna Nova]

20 hours ago, angeoco said:

The system shoe settings deform your feet into a shoe shape, complete with the platform and heel that you set. (Then, ugh, people used to texture/paint that to make it look like an actual shoe ...) Then you can add an alpha which makes the platform and heel invisible, so that your feet are floating above the ground, and you can cover them with mesh/sculpt shoes. Or add a full-body alpha and a mesh body, which also floats above the ground.

Then, if you set a "hover height", it gives you even more height, regardless of what you are wearing.

Thanks for that.  Now it starts to make sense.  Almost all those settings, apart from the heights, are changing the shape of something I already alpha-ed out!

[Anna Nova]

10 hours ago, Klytyna said:

There's a good reason for that...

For example, if you buy high heel shoes for a Maitreya, they generally WON'T include a shoebase because... You already have one, it's supplied with your Maitreya, a high heel foot shoebase. They only include an additional shoe base if for example, the shoe in addition to being a high heel/high foot, also has a substantial platform sole.

Fetishistic shoes with 4 inch platforms, and 10 inch heels, include shoebases, so do ballet point thigh boots and ponygirl hooves, but your generic Vanilla strappy high heel won't.

As for problems with 'hover heights changing' when you come out of appearance edit, that's probably because you still have the 'use appearance edit pose when editing appearance' option enabled, when you finish editing, it finishes using the pose, and you return to your normal AO poses.
 

As I guess it's obvious by now, I'm one of those who needs to know 'WHY'.  And now I do.  Thanks.  And ya, I do have that appearance pose thing set.  Edit: I thought I had, but on checking I don't - so that is still a mystery.

Glad I asked.

Edited December 30, 2017 by anna2358

[Anna Nova]

10 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

I just keep that Hover Height slider at the top of my screen and adjust as needed.

You have to do that anyway, because so many places have terrible physics.  That's why I always set my as-worn height on Linden bottom-land, you just can't trust a mesh plane.

[LittleMe Jewell]

6 hours ago, anna2358 said:

You have to do that anyway, because so many places have terrible physics.  That's why I always set my as-worn height on Linden bottom-land, you just can't trust a mesh plane.

Since I have to do it all the time because of the designs everywhere, I figure there is no reason to even mess with the other methods.  As a matter of fact, most of the time I don't even remove the high heel foot shape when I put on flats (though I don't wear flats very often).