Questions from a newbie about shoe creation

[Butler Offcourse]

Hello everyone!

I would love to start creating shoes for sl, but I was a bit confused, so I wanted to ask some questions to people with more experience.

Just a little bit of background about me. I am not new to modelling as I am a yacht designer in RL and I am modelling bunch of stuff for my work and rendering them. But we use nurbs modelling, so preferably Rhinocersor3D or Alias Autostudio which is complete different way of modelling, so that's why, I had never cared to try to learn a different modelling technique and may be mess my existing knowledge but getting confused at the end, nor I had the time for it. Also I should admit that I hated it's old UI, LOL.

With lockdown and working with 50% rhytm, I was getting bored in my free time and I decided to check some blender videos and wanted to give it a try again. Polygonal modelling has always been very intimidating to me, but also, it was very interesting as the "sculpting" way of modelling was very cool and I thought that I could use it for my work in the future to make some "fast" ideation models/concepts. So I dedicated myself to some tutorials and started to learn blender. I have already made a watch completely in blender and a shoe for a RL friend's shoe company with some photorealistic renders. I'm adding a quick render of the watch as well. Well the watch was the first three model I did, so please be kind with your critiques! 

Having said that, then I wanted to dive deeper in Blender, checked many tutorials about the topology of polygon models, how to make them correct, uv unwrapping, baking textures with cycles..etc, trying to understand about the vertex numbers, trying to make non-destructive modelling...etc etc. And the more I dived deep, the more I realized how unbeleivable Blender is as a free app and with it's add-ons, it becomes even more powerful and I start to have fun modelling with it spending all my free time trying to learn it lately and as you may imagine, I am faaaaaaaaar from being good at it. 

So, after playing around with it, I was thinking that I would enjoy making shoes for SL. Not only shoes, may be furnitures, buildings..etc too in the future but would enjoy starting with shoes even though I know that it is not the easiest. So here's my confusions, thoughts and questions:

- Since I never had a shop, I will never ever have chance to get my hands on the dev kits of big companies such as Maitreya, Legacy (TMP), Slink...etc so I have to start with a more "newbie friendly" company such as Ebody. Ok, took the dev kit from them. When you make an open toe shoe, do you model the shoes as well? or do you use the toes from the dev kit and just make new toe nail colors/nail polish..etc ? How does it work?

- I know how to bake texture for an object with a single material, like let's say, if I make a table, I am able to bake it thru cycles in all wood. But if I want to make metal legs for it, I don't know how to do it. Should I bake them separately and then link them in sl? Obviously same applies for the shoes, if I make shoes with two three different materials/colors, how can I bake it? I could not really find helpful resources on it. If you could point me to some of them, I would appreciate it.

- Faces/triangles count is important and I have to keep it as low as possible and SL is allowing for around 75k faces if i am not wrong, to upload. More face / more lags? When I ask my friends like how many faces would normally be a nicely modelled converse shoe (more or less) they always tell me as low as i can. But the problem is this, I would love to have a guideline in front of me, If I am too far off from the ideal number or not. For example, if I model it with 20k faces, then I may say "that's it, it is very low poly, it is fantastic..etc" whereas may be the ideal number would be 5k. That is why, I would love to know if you could give me some approximative numbers. Obviously it depends on the number of details, such as modelled stitches against stitches on texture..etc, but I was curious if i could find out some numbers.

- Modifiers, is an other confusion. Obviously since I am working on yachts and sometimes on cars and nurbs modelling there is no such thing as smoothing..etc, I am used to see things smooth and I use smoothing a lot (subdivision modifer) while modelling and it is a big "no-no" for secondlife If I understand right as it increases the amount of vertexes/faces..etc. So I am trying to get used to use it less, instead using bevels..etc etc, but, in blender, when I make "shade smooth" , it makes the things look nicer with less subdivision, when I export it in collada format for SL, will it upload with shade smooth or shade flat? Will the modifiers be applied during the export process? I suppose yes, but still wanted to ask.

Sorry I asked many questions and it is a long post, I hope that someone could point me to more resources or give me some advices. I have already watched a lot of youtube tutorials both SL and non SL oriented for Blender as in the beginning I wanted to learn more about the modelling in blender rather than "modelling for SL".

 

Edited February 22, 2021 by Butler Offcourse

[Aquila Kytori]

Hi, welcome to the SL forums

Hmmmmmmmm.................  yes perhaps to many questions in a single post.

I can answer a couple of them then perhaps others more qualified can reply to the others.

 

21 hours ago, Butler Offcourse said:

I know how to bake texture for an object with a single material, like let's say, if I make a table, I am able to bake it thru cycles in all wood. But if I want to make metal legs for it, I don't know how to do it. Should I bake them separately and then link them in sl? Obviously same applies for the shoes, if I make shoes with two three different materials/colors, how can I bake it? I could not really find helpful resources on it. If you could point me to some of them, I would appreciate it.

For a small object like shoes or a table you would bake all the materials to a single texture. (Maximum of 8 materials for a SL mesh object).

You already understand the process of how to bake out to a image texture in Blender. (Add a new Image Texture node, create a New image in that node to bake to and then to have that Image Texture node Selected before hitting the bake button.

 When you have more than 1 material to bake to a single Image Texture you simple copy (CTRL  C) and paste (CTRL V) this Image Texture node from the material 1 node setup into the node setups of the other materials. And of course making sure that the Image texture node is selected in each setup before baking.

Blender will then bake all the materials that are pointing to this Image Texture into that one Image.

In the screenshot below, the 2 materials are both pointing to the "2 material bake" image to bake to so both materials are then baked to that one image:

 

A mesh object for SL can have up to 8 materials but only 1 UV map. These materials faces can be  UV unwrapped to occupy a single UV space or they can be unwrapped so that each material occupies its own UV space, Stacked UV's, (or a combination of the 2).  For a small object, a single texture for all the materials would be sufficient but for larger objects like buildings and vehicles then the stacked UV islands method would be used. Of course when using the stacked UV's then each "layer" in the stack would have its own Image Texture to bake to. Hope this makes some kind of sense to you :).

 

21 hours ago, Butler Offcourse said:

- Faces/triangles count is important and I have to keep it as low as possible and SL is allowing for around 75k faces if i am not wrong, to upload. More face / more lags? When I ask my friends like how many faces would normally be a nicely modelled converse shoe (more or less) they always tell me as low as i can. But the problem is this, I would love to have a guideline in front of me, If I am too far off from the ideal number or not. For example, if I model it with 20k faces, then I may say "that's it, it is very low poly, it is fantastic..etc" whereas may be the ideal number would be 5k. That is why, I would love to know if you could give me some approximative numbers. Obviously it depends on the number of details, such as modelled stitches against stitches on texture..etc, but I was curious if i could find out some numbers.

If I remember correctly, The Original SL avatar (Ruth) uses around 7k triangles so for a pair of shoes ......................... ?  500 tris ? 😧   lol

There are no guide line. Your friends are correct, use as few polys as possible, Create your first pair of shoes with 20k tris, texture them as best you can then load them up and rezz them in world to see how the look. The thing is how close do you need to look ?

People like "pretty" They like all the tiny details. Offer someone a pair of trainers, one high poly version with every stitch modelled in and another lower poly pair where the shoes rely on basic texturing for things like that.

99%  are going to choose the the first pair. ...................high poly sells !!!

How many tris an object should have depends on the mindset of the creator. You obviously do care about trying to produce optimum mesh so you have to look at the 20K shoes you have just produced and say how can I reduce them to 5k? High to low poly workflow and  baking out normal maps etc   Let the texture do the work. Modelling is not difficult , texturing is !

Ideally you should be producing "game ready assets" so search for tutorials on how they are made

Note: Instead of logging into the SL Main Grid (Agni)  to do your test uploads, there is a second option the SL Beta Test Grid (Aditi). Uploads to Beta grid are "free"

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh

But unfortunately I believe that at the moment there are problems with new people logging into that grid. https://status.secondlifegrid.net/incidents/q3mnxnpys7dt

 

21 hours ago, Butler Offcourse said:

- Modifiers, is an other confusion. Obviously since I am working on yachts and sometimes on cars and nurbs modelling there is no such thing as smoothing..etc, I am used to see things smooth and I use smoothing a lot (subdivision modifer) while modelling and it is a big "no-no" for secondlife If I understand right as it increases the amount of vertexes/faces..etc. So I am trying to get used to use it less, instead using bevels..etc etc, but, in blender, when I make "shade smooth" , it makes the things look nicer with less subdivision, when I export it in collada format for SL, will it upload with shade smooth or shade flat? .............

The same shading you apply in Blender will generally be used on the rezzed model in SL.

 

21 hours ago, Butler Offcourse said:

Will the modifiers be applied during the export process? I suppose yes, but still wanted to ask.

Yes but you have to make sure that you have the Apply Modifiers option checked in the Collada export panel. Collada export panel > Gear icon > Geometry > Export Data Option > Apply Modifiers.

If you choose the SL+Open Sim Static ( or Rigged)  Presets then generally all the right options will be checked for you :

 

I hope the above helps some 

 

 

Edited February 23, 2021 by Aquila Kytori

[Butler Offcourse]

Hello @Aquila Kytori,

First of all thank you very much for your long detailed answer, I appreciate it a lot. 

I agree that I had a little bit too many questions lol but it is like the accumulation of questions that I could not find answer after my 2-3 weeks of "intense" experience in Blender. While I was reading your answer, I was thinking the same thing, modelling is not hard, right uv unwrapping and textureing is hard. Even though I have a much better knowledge with graphic apps such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Affinity Suit, Procreate and so on, still, adapting them this way to 3d renders is something new to me and something confusing that I am still trying to figure out. 

The UV baking process is clear now, thank you very much. Just a quick question, I see that your viewport is split in two for the node editor for each shader, how is it possible? did you put it there in photoshop just to show? as for me, the shader is always shows the only selected object, I see that you have all the object selected and the node editor automatically adjusts it for each window? Or can I select one material/object, in node editor select the texture and then select the other material/object and copy paste and select on node editor in the texture and they will remain selected? Yesterday @MiliMigli has been very kind to explain the techniques of UV baking, inworld, in two different methods, so your explanation together with hers has become very clear, thank you! 

500 tris for a shoe? I hope that you were kidding as if it is not the case, I should stop right away as I do not know how I could achieve such result! LOL

Here's an example of what I am experimenting on right now. I am adding them to the attachments as I could not figure out how you post the images under the paragraph.

So I have the statics turned on in overlay options, and when I hide the feet (Ebody Flat Feet), it is telling me that I have 3.048 triangles. This is the number I should look at, right? I still did not even add all the details, I am still trying to figure out on the final shape with nice proportions and I am still not pleased, for now. Then I will be adding some pipeing on the opening in a different colour and seperate the nose part in two horizontally to make in two colours. The UV Unwrapping is still a mess, I have some stretching that I am trying to fix and the textures wont be the ones on the photos, it was just to try but anyways, UV unwrapping I have to do when I finish it, I was just trying to see how bad it was for now.. lol. I have difficulty in UV unwrapping, I find it hard to avoid stretching, but well, an other point where I have to improve myself, and I should If I want to use textures such as the one I showed on the photo as the stretching is much more evident/obvious on those one rather than some noise added to a color to imitate leather..etc. 

So for now my tris number is far from 500 and it will grow lol. But then obviously, I will be deleting some inner faces of the shoes on the toe part as they wont be visible, to improve the tris count and if i do not intend to rez it in a shop ..etc , i can delete all the interior faces just after the surface turns towards inside. But then again, even if i intend it, in the future, for the future i can save one for rezzing, and one for wearing. Because I want to make the inner part in a different colour. I guess I am trying to do more than my capacity lol

For the shading part, @MiliMigli explained me the steps you showed me, and I experimented with it, it is wonderful, actually I discovered that with smooth shading I even have less vertex number as vertexes are shared (or something like that lol). 

The last two weeks, each time that I tries to log in to Secondlife Beta Grid, it never let me log in, it never worked for me, so it is most probably for the issue that you have been talking about.  

I was thinking may be opening a new thread where I show my progress on the shoe, and take advices from more experienced people like you on my actual state. Like I show what I am doing and may be people would be so kind enough to tell me "there are too many vertices/edges/faces, try to decrease" and I would show again. You know, like school work and teachers. 😊

Thank you very much again for your advices and the time you dedicated to show and type it all, much appreciated. 😊

 

 

 

 

 

Edited February 23, 2021 by Butler Offcourse

[Butler Offcourse]

Looking at my posts now, I could decrease one of the horizontal edge loops going all the side and on the toe part as well I can decrease one of the edge loops.

Update:

I got crazy while tying to UV unwrap and trying to fix stretches, just to try, I downloaded Substance Painter, I will be honest, without looking at much tutorial, I briefly looked at 2, I did this to see how it works and actually it works nice without UV unwrapping in blender but I have to still check how the baking..etc here works, but it is fun to be able to draw on the shoe. I know that I can do it in blender too, but I don't have the brushes in it, here it is all inclusive. Here's an example of what I did without playing with the lightings yet. As you can see, stitches..etc are not aligned well or straight enough because I just wanted to see what I could do. 

So, if I use the substance painter, can I get away with the UV Unwrapping and use it's unwrap?

 

Edited February 23, 2021 by Butler Offcourse

[Aquila Kytori]

7 hours ago, Butler Offcourse said:

I downloaded Substance Painter, I will be honest, without looking at much tutorial, I briefly looked at 2, I did this to see how it works and actually it works nice without UV unwrapping in blender but I have to still check how the baking..etc here works, but it is fun to be able to draw on the shoe. I know that I can do it in blender too, but I don't have the brushes in it, here it is all inclusive. Here's an example of what I did without playing with the lightings yet. As you can see, stitches..etc are not aligned well or straight enough because I just wanted to see what I could do. 

So, if I use the substance painter, can I get away with the UV Unwrapping and use it's unwrap?

 

WOW !  You have certainly set yourself onto the fast track as far as learning about creating mesh content for SL. Very impressive.

I don't use Substance Painter, its one of the things on my list though.

My question is ......... SP is UV unwrapping your model for you which is "all fine and dandy" while the model is in SP but how are you expecting to have that UV mapping applied to your model when it is back in Blender or rezzed inworld?   SP allows you to export various texture maps but does it allow you to export the model with the new UV mapping? If so then all is fine but if not .................. all those nice textures will be good for nothing ?

Something that may be of interest to you is this Substance Painter tutorial :

baked lightening filter - Substance painter - YouTube

She uses a different workflow than other tutorials I have watched . A Baked Lighting Environmental filter specially for baking out textures for SL. I think it is worth watching from the very beginning but if you are in a hurry ( 🙂  ) start at the 3 minute mark.

 

8 hours ago, Butler Offcourse said:

I am adding them to the attachments as I could not figure out how you post the images under the paragraph.

Images are inserted at the position of the cursor.

1: Drag in the image.

2: LMB click where you want the image to be inserted.

3: Hit the    (Insert into post ) icon (which you will find overlaying the Image)  to insert the image at the position of the cursor.

[Butler Offcourse]

Hello @Aquila Kytori and thank you very much for your encouraging words and help, I appreciate it!

Having said that, I thought/hoped that with substance painter i could export uv mapping or bake it right there..etc, I feel like I had seen such video fast forward but I am not sure. So obviously, If i can not export it that way, then it will definitely be useless. But I don't understand, no matter that I put the correct seams in Blender, I always get stretching which i am not able to fix. Some people say that either you get stretching or you don't have good tileing if you use tileable texture, so that put me off a bit to be honest. I even have textools in Blender for UV mapping adjustments but I am not able to fix the stretching.

I will check the video that you have sent, thank you very much!!

Also I appreciate for teaching me how to insert a photo, let me try it to show you how the shoe looks on the feet of a friend with the ebody body. It seems to fit quite well (it is still unrigged) so I was excited like a child to see my first mesh object fit on the feet of a friend! The other two images are from blender to show how I tried to fit them, I wanted to have round front so i could not bring it more backwards but I am alwyas open to critics or advices! 

 

I guess that it worked! Thank you!

Actually I think that it is enough to drag the image exactly where you want it (where you have the typing cursor) without clicking on the + sign and it automatically adds there, let's see if it works.

 

 

I have no idea why I have that strange reflecting next to the pinky toe. It happens when I shade smooth, the vertexes there doesn't seem to be in a weird position as you may see/judge from the image of my previous post. 😕

Edited February 23, 2021 by Butler Offcourse

[Aquila Kytori]

57 minutes ago, Butler Offcourse said:

But I don't understand, no matter that I put the correct seams in Blender, I always get stretching which i am not able to fix. Some people say that either you get stretching or you don't have good tileing if you use tileable texture, so that put me off a bit to be honest

Don't worry about it, just do it !

If you know you will be baking out textures then a little stretching will be fine.

Often you would be adding seams for UV unwrapping where there are "seams" in the real world item. (If you are unwrapping a teddy bear then it makes sense to add the seams where the sew seams are on a real world teddy bear so that the resulting UV islands would look like the sewing pattern of the teddy.)

Unfortunately these shoes are different. The uppers of that style of shoe are cut from a single piece of material/leather and then formed, stretched around a mold to give it the rounded toe shape. The shoe would therefore have a single seam at the back of the heal, (plus seams where the uppers are attached to the sole and another where it is attached to the inner material). Because of this "forming" it is impossible to only have the same seams on the model as the real world shoe and then expect to have no stretching. To relieve the stretching you would need to add more seams around the toe area.

You can live with the small amount of stretching and take your shoe into Substance Painter and texture it as before and I'm guessing all will be fine.

Or you can add more seams ............ you saw how SP unwrapped your shoe, that should give you an idea of where to add seams to get a similar UV unwrap.

Next time choose a shoe something like a trainer where the uppers are made from lots of panels;  Then you will have alot less problems with adding seams and stretching 

By the way what we want to see are wire frames of the shoes. If you have the tri count down to less than 5k or better, closer to 3k then I say you are on the right track as far as complexity is concerned.  

As for the little shading problem ...........it will be caused by edge flow......... again we need to see the wireframe.

Edited February 23, 2021 by Aquila Kytori

[Butler Offcourse]

Hello again @Aquila Kytori and thank you again for your helpful advices and detailed reply. 😊

Yes little stretching is fine for normal textures and again, i can paint on Substance painter and add some noise, grains..etc where there is stretching to fix it. But what if i want to use a tileable texture such as the red one that I had in my first post? then it is impossible? 

The idea of looking at where the seams are on a real object is very interesting idea, I had never thought about it, thank you for the heads up! 😉

For the seams when I tried to unwrap in Blender, I had put a vertical seam in the midle part of the rear and i had put seams on the top parts where the surface turns towards inside. So in theory, it is correct judging with your reply. 

Also the idea to unwrap in blender and then try to use substance painter is a good idea, i will try that, i have more ease with it for now as with the nodes I am not feeling very very comfortable yet but it is definitely something i am trying to learn but i get  intimidated with it's complexity when i get lost with them lol. I still didn't find out where to see the substance painter's unwrapping but now i will search google and find it as I am curious about it too. 

Here's a link to a sneaker that I did in Blender. It was my second model in blender, unwrapped, textured and rendered in blender/cycles but this was extremely high poly and here with such texture, stretching was not a huge problem even tho the unwrap result was slightly better than the ballerina flats that I am trying to do right now.

Here's the link: https://postimg.cc/Rqg5MqfF

And here are the wireframe views as requested. 🙂 One of them is with smoothing on and the other one is swith smoothing off to show both of them. I see that the edge where the reflection is bad is kind of "broken" when the smoothing is used (smoothing value:1) instead of beeing straight but I feel a bit confused there as there is no vertex in the middle of them, so I dont know how to fix it other than adding an edge loop there 😕

 

 

EDIT: Found it how to check the UV unwrap in Substance Painter, it is unwrapped like this, so yes, I see many cuts, and a rather unusual one on the front, here it is:

With this red texture, I think that substance is doing some black magic as there is no stretching, it is insane!! lol

 

Well, no matter how much I loved using the Substance Painter, I guess that I came to a dead end as I am not able to properly export the textures, even by following the tutorials, it gives me weird results. I tried createing a new export preset with RGB's with 2D view,  only with diffuse, normal and specular texture..etc but well, no luck. So now, going back to blender and force myself to fix the UV Wrapping. 

A question, even if i want to make both the interior and the exterior colour the same, I should still, always, apply solidify before unwrapping, am I correct?

Edited February 24, 2021 by Butler Offcourse

[Aquila Kytori]

9 hours ago, Butler Offcourse said:

A question, even if i want to make both the interior and the exterior colour the same, I should still, always, apply solidify before unwrapping, am I correct?

Yes.

While you can assign different materials to the new geometry (inside and rim polys) created by the Solidify modifier before it is Applied, you cannot Add seams for the UV unwrapping.

 

The screenshots of Painters UV unwrapping shows 2 things ........ alot of wasted space and that it is baking to a larger image than can be used in SL. 2k or 4K ?

So the detail looks awesome in SP but I expect when scaled down to a 1024² texture (a much lower texture resolution) it would not be the same

You can do a better UV unwrap in Blender.

 

9 hours ago, Butler Offcourse said:

Well, no matter how much I loved using the Substance Painter, I guess that I came to a dead end as I am not able to properly export the textures, even by following the tutorials, it gives me weird results. I tried createing a new export preset with RGB's with 2D view,  only with diffuse, normal and specular texture..etc but well, no luck. So now, going back to blender and force myself to fix the UV Wrapping. 

Personally,  if I had access to and SP,  I would still use SP to texture the ballerina shoe with that awkward red texture.

1: I would UV unwrap the shoes outer surface using more seams. Example in the image below. Note the 3 short seams at the toe of the shoe.

2: After UV unwrapping reposition and scale the UV islands in the UV space so they take up as much space as possible, (leaving space for the other material faces to be unwrapped if need be. I think I would also have the other materials unwrapped at a lesser scale than the outer surface UV islands because they would not need the same resolution.)

3: Watch the SP for SL tutorial  I linked to yesterday again and take notes.

4: Take the shoe model into SP and let it do its magic  

 

 

 

[Butler Offcourse]

Hello again @Aquila Kytori , I love your replies, they are helping me a lot, thank you!

I understand the reason to unwrap after solidify but what I don’t understand is, you said that SP lost too much space in UV Unwrapping. If we unwrap with the cuts that it did (I’m not talking about your cutting suggestion yet) , what I see or suppose from the UV Unwrap of the SP from the 2D image is that it has only one full cut, so, if i had cut the way it did, i could not make the UV island much bigger as there is only one UV island, right? The most I could do would be rotating it  a bit more and fill more diagonal space, am I correct?

On the other hand, if I cut the way you advice, I will have more UV islands so that I can position them side by side..etc and fill in more space, am I correct? I also love the idea of making small cuts like the nose area to release the tension, that I never thought of doing, I have always done complete cuts, so now i will be trying it. Thank you!

I also think that the reason my SP textures did not work, it is what came to my mind yesterday when I went to sleep, was this. I had uploaded the model in secondlife without UV unwrapping just because my friend wanted to try it on to see if it fits. Then when I had the SP textures, I just uploaded them and applied to the model that I had uploaded earlier. So obviously they had no clue on where to attach things. Also this makes me understand why SP can not be used for Unwrapping as it is not saving the unwrapping info, so the unwrapping should always be done in Blender first. 

That tutorial..... I am so stupid for not watching that earlier, it is the best tutorial for SP for SL! So from watching the video, I realised some of my mistakes:

- The lightning I was using is a fake one that will never ever be visible in SL. So I had to use the base colour mode as she shows but this brings it closer to a normal Rendering software, but what I love in SP is that the viewport is very fast, faster than Evee for my old but gold grapics card ( GTX 980M on my 4.5 years old laptop ) , so in SP, I am able to see the modifications I make “more realtime” and it helps a lot in my opinion when you are a noob and you have no idea when you change certain settings and do not have to wait 2-3 minutes between each small change. 

- I realised that I never used enviornment lighting, I actually tried but it did not really give good effects.

- I also learned a lot about the UI of the Substance and loved how she added that final flower like effects on the metal with alpha brushes, I was doing them manually.

I will give it a try again and share my “achievements” with you once I can do something. 

Why don’t you try the SP? it is free to try to see if you will like it or not, I’m sure that you would love it! 

Thank you thank you thank you!! Now I learned so much new stuff from your post of today, going to try them now!

 

[Butler Offcourse]

Hello again @Aquila Kytori 

So I followed the tutorial that you have advised me to watch and i still have soo long to go but anyways, here's the result both in Substance Painter and SL. I also made a screenshot of the object inspection. I added the textures one by one to the faces as it is the way substance is baking. But I am able to import them to blender with a node with texture as colour input, so I will may be try to rerender or bake in Cycles later. I unwrapped it in this way as adding the cuts to the sides and to the front was making me problems with tileing. 

 

And here it is in secondlife:

 

 

Now I have to fix the small issue/interferance that I had with the foot and then I have to proceed on rigging. May be at one or two more details and then create LoD models. I have a question again, lol, for the second shoe, should I retexture it all, or should I just mirror the textures? would that work?

I will also try to bake all those textures in Blender with the textures I imported from Substance and I will try to bake it all together, If I manage, but I fear that the uv islands may overlap as I have created them all seperately. 

Thank you! 

Edited February 24, 2021 by Butler Offcourse

[Aquila Kytori]

Again just WOW !

If I understand you correctly you did the UV unwrapping of the shoe in Blender and the texturing in SP and next in Blender you plan on baking all the textures created in  SP to a single texure for SL?  Sounds good  🙂

 

1 hour ago, Butler Offcourse said:

If I manage, but I fear that the uv islands may overlap as I have created them all seperately. 

You could add a new UV map, (add more seams if necessary)  and Unwrap a second time, this time with the islands all on 1 UV space perhaps with the islands laid out something like in my screenshot below. Does that make sense ?  Should be enough info in this tutorial :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X74tUMqKFc

 

1 hour ago, Butler Offcourse said:

 I have a question again, lol, for the second shoe, should I retexture it all, or should I just mirror the textures? would that work?

Yes

In Edit mode select the shoe,   SHFT D to make a copy and S X -1 to scale the copy in the negative X.

After doing the negative scaling you will need Flip the normals. In Edit mode with new shoe selected ALT N  to open the Normals menu  and choose the Flip option.

Textures should stay good.

 

I have been testing to to check out the UV mapping of a shoe like that and came to the same conclusion as you did. UV seams only along the top and bottom edges and one at heel.

But, I Unwrapped in two steps.

The first unwrap I did with seams along the top and bottom edges only. Next I added the seam at the heel, and in the UV editor pinned (red vertices in the UV map image below) the toe vertices so they don't move  and Unwrapped a second time.

After the second unwrap  the newly unwrapped vertices were straightened  along both X and Y.

The result  I think would be good enough for me but perhaps not for you lol.  Anyways the UV islands are taking up most of the UV space now.

1448 triangles.

I like the way the UV island for the "uppers" are laid out because they remind me of actual leather cut-outs for real shoes, 😀

This does result in having some stretching though. This stretching would not matter so much now when you bake from the textures created in SP.

 

 

[Butler Offcourse]

WOW? I should be the one who says wow to your shoe!!! it looks fantastic!! and only 1400 triangles!! 😱 Ok but I will go in order to write my reply! 🙂

First of all, again, thank you very much, sincerely for taking your time to walk me thru this process, your help is very precious and much appreciated and I am learning new stuff from your each post, you are very kind, thank you! And I hope that this thread would help other people who had similar confusions as some of the answers you have given me is not easy to find on the web, so thank you! 🙂 Also thank you for your compliments and encouraging words! ☺️

 

Yes, I did the UV unwrapping in Blender, then exported an .obj file to the Substance Painter with their UVs, done all the painting, stitching things..etc in SP and then baked all the textures there. The result you see in SL is from the baked textures of SP directly, only with the color base/diffuse texture. I did not add normals as the bump was already visible, so I did not want to create unnecessary texture "toll" to the servers. Even tho it looks quite nice, I should admit that it is not like some of the shoes I see in SL which are crisp and sharp when I zoom in, so that's one point that I will have to learn to fix in the future but for now it is a detail, or let's say, second step in my learning. As info, I used 1024 pixel for the textures on this shoe. IN SP , it looks wonderful with 2048 pixel and when I lower it to 1024 knowing that SL does not support higher res, I watch the result with a sad face lol.

 

Now, I am again, trying to do everything in Blender, for a simple reason. In SP, the environments that I have put, does not light the object as I would really like, even tho I tried different rotations for the environment and it kept one side of the shoe much darker. So I will do it in Blender with my lights, but now I am also looking how to do the texture painting in Blender even though I can put the last details on Photoshop if I can not achieve it in Blender. Let's see. 

 

Lovely, that is exactly what I want to achieve and I don't know. Today a friend of mine showed me her uv map of a necklace she did, all the islands were in the same texture even the ones with different materials. I did not know how to do it, I was going to try it with the texture baking method that you had showed me that's why I was trying to prepare the textures in Blender now. Obviously Blender crashing on me sometimes did not really help lol. She told me to put all the baked textures on top of each other and then position them in photoshop so they don't overlap but this thing did not really convince me as they would not work with the uv mapping anymore, so I did not try it. But she is using 3ds Max so her way of doing stuff can be different, I don't know, but the video that you had sent me is very useful, I had seen it in the past but now that I am more focused on UV unwrapping and baking, I will watch it more carefully now. Thank you! 🙂

 

Perfect, once I finish the texture in Blender, I will try the method you told me, it should work!

 

Now now now... the shoe that you have modelled! IT is unbelleivable! 1400 tris and it looks fantastic!! Did you delete the interio faces that wont be visible? from the UV unwrap it does not seem so, but well, now that you told me this, it gives me a good number that I know that I should achieve! Well, When I added the piping on the opening, that pipeping is almost as complex as the rest of the shoe with 2k tris. So yes, I still have some refinements to do or to learn to do. 

One other problem I have is the solidify, when I applied it, all the "thickness" surface is not straight like yours but they are like stretched arcs in Z. Weird, tried to hide that mess with the pipeing  but wait, I did not try to mark those edges sharp , may be it could be the solution to my problem? Am I able to explain the problem correctly? lol. Like the shape is going towards up ( obviously in Z ) even tho there is no edge or vertex there. Here's a screenshot of the problem:

 

 

Your UV islands, they looks so organized, so straight! Mines looks like a map of an undiscovered continent whereas yours are very well organized and so understandable looking at the maps. When I look at mine, to understand which vertex corresponds on which part of the shoe, I have to use the sync viewport to UV editor viewport mode. I did not know anything about pining the vertexes, and two step unwrap processes. I definitely had zero idea, so it is interesting and I will try to do it as well!

You are talking about stretching but other than a veeeeeery slight stretching that you have on the nose part, I do not see any issues and it definitely looks MUCH better than mine. Now I am jealous LOL!!

So now, my model looks like this in Blender, work in progress, and before applying any of the new techniques that you advised me on your post now! ☺️ The materials are not mine, I find them from an add-on called BlenderKit then I scale and modify them slightly with the node editor. Still need to learn it better but I want to pass to it after I learn better the UV unwrapping and modelling. 

 

 

EDIT 1 : At first, from the advices you gave, I tried to learn how to put all in a single texture and I found out that it is called Texture Atlas, so searching it that way brought me to some other tutorials. The Youtube video that you linked did not help me to figure out how to do, but I found an other video and I will share the link here for other who can need the help of it, here it is:

So far, with the method explained in the video, I was able to create a bake with all the uv unwraps together. I still did not correct the UV Unwrap that you showed me on your previous post, I still have to do it but at first I was curious how to do all the UVs together. And I came up to an other problem now, I see the shoe quite nice in the Render, but while I am baking the result looks pretty bad, especially on the red part, it is too dark whereas it has nice lights and shadows in the render viewport window. While baking I chose diffuse as Bake Type and checked the direct and indirect lights. I also tried without the direct and indirect lights but then it becomes flat. I also tried the combined Bake Type, always with a bad result. Here's an example, now I am searching on google, reddit, forums and youtube to find out what could be the cause of the problem. The more I am trying to do, the more I am sinking deeper I guess.. lol.

 

EDIT 2 : Hello again @Aquila Kytori , this morning I watched some baking videos and then left it a bit for now and tried the unwrapping process that you explained yesterday. Pinning is an amazing stuff, I had no idea I could do such things, obviously some experience is needed to understand where the pining should be in the future but well, here's the result that I obtained with your advice. Exterior is pretty good! Interior needs some work but I am sure that I can fix it as this way, UV Unwrap is much more understandable!  Thank you! Here's the result of the unwrap:

 

When I look at your example, I realise that you have applied the Subdivision modifier before unwrapping, is it always better to do in such way? Or it does not change much? may be applying it helps later for textureing to serve as a guide if you want to add some details on photoshop like for stitches..etc? Also I saw that you have certain triangles (I guess that they are called ngons right?) rather than quads, did you do it for a particular reason such as reducing tris number? I thought that I should never have triangles and all should be quads, am I missing something here?

Edited February 25, 2021 by Butler Offcourse

[Aquila Kytori]

On 2/24/2021 at 7:36 PM, Butler Offcourse said:

And I came up to an other problem now, I see the shoe quite nice in the Render, but while I am baking the result looks pretty bad, especially on the red part, it is too dark whereas it has nice lights and shadows in the render viewport window. While baking I chose diffuse as Bake Type and checked the direct and indirect lights. I also tried without the direct and indirect lights but then it becomes flat. I also tried the combined Bake Type, always with a bad result. Here's an example, now I am searching on google, reddit, forums and youtube to find out what could be the cause of the problem. The more I am trying to do, the more I am sinking deeper I guess.. lol.

A quick reply ..........

It looks like you have other objects that are interfering with your bake...... probably the foot. 

Make sure that it is not included in the baking by unchecking the  Disable in Renders icon in the Outliner. see my screenshots below.

With the foot included in the bake :

 

 and now with the render filter for the foot unchecked:

 

To have the little icons displayed in the Outliner open the the  Filter drop_down (top left hand corner of Outliner) .........

Also if you haven't tried yet check the Ambient Occlusion option you may find it lightens your baking a little.

Anyways I have to dash now , will try to get back to some of your earlier questions later in the day

Edited February 26, 2021 by Aquila Kytori

[Butler Offcourse]

Hello @Aquila Kytori , thank you very much for your reply, I appreciate it!

As usual, you are a genius and solved my problem! It was definitely that the problem, I knew about disabling for render but to be honest, I completely forgot about that when I was baking, so I made a test baking and uploaded to SL and the baking works definitely very well, thank you! And this way I realised that I am using 6 times less Vram, so it should be better for the performance of the game I suppose! Here's a screenshot from inside the game:

So now I am able to add text, stitches..etc in Photoshop. Obviously it sucks as I did it in one minute just to try.

Edited February 26, 2021 by Butler Offcourse

[Butler Offcourse]

Progress, I decided to fix an issue that i had in the shoe from the beginning:

- So I finally fixed the thickness faces of the body of the shoe. The problem that I was stating in one of my older posts that the thickness was was not straight but it was strangely pointy and sharp which i I had hidden under the pipe going around the opening but then it was still looking ugly with the material separation as the exterior color was still visible on the top part of the inside, so I brought the subdivision modifier value to 0 and saw the problem, the inner vertexes, were lower than the ones of the exterior body. I have no idea why as I had only applied solidifier modifier. May be it should be adjusted after applying no idea, but anyways, I aligned in z the interior vertexes with the exterior ones around the thickness faces then I increased the crease on both ends forming a very slightly roundish face, much less pronounced than before. And while doing this, a question came to my mind:

What I did with the crease, I thought that it was the "make sharp" option but actually I realized that I was able to use the crease without the make sharp, then what is the difference if i may ask? I use the crease instead of adding loop cuts to avoid increasing the number of faces and tris count.Here's the before and after result:

Before:

After:

 

And then here is the new pipeing I created with an edge loop in the middle of the thickness face, separated the edge loop, turned it into a curve and then played with the bevel values, this was exactly the way I had done the previous one but strangely it was bugging and was going almost flat on the sides, this one looks perfect:

So, more than a question, this time I just wanted to share the progress, today I did not have a lot of time to play with it but still, I am enjoying it! So after these changes:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Now I will fix an other minor issue on the bottom part of the body where I saw a hole and then I will reunwrap it the way you showed me because as you were saying, this way, there is a lot of lost space, so if i unwrapped your way, i can have more space and I suppose that it would make the texture look crisper. So I wanna try it now!

UPDATE: Well, I still did not unwrap it but I fixed the other imperfection that I was talking about, and I have been playing with textures, but my god.. while playing with textures, the time passes too fast! It is midnight!! What I did was, I put ready made materials, then go to the nodes, play with them, sometimes change the texture with my textures but taking adventage of their node set-ups, looking fun! 

 

Well than I kept changing, adjusting...etc etc and then decided to upload it to SL again. This time I wanted to try the materials as well. So I uploaded one with the combined texture, which is this one:

 

And then I did an other bake with diffuse texture without lights, normal texture and the occlusion texture and applied them to their places in the edit object menu. Well, the result is...umm I have some mixed feelings. The interior looks crispier, nicer, but I have a strange blur depending on the position of the camera as if I have depth of field or like a macro shot  bluring everything around my focus. Having said that, the exterior body has some weird bumps as well, most probably the creases are acting as bumps with the normal map. On the other hand, the interior looks much nicer and it is nice to see the light move around the shoe. 🙃 Well, I am just experimenting for now.

 

Edited February 27, 2021 by Butler Offcourse

[Kyrah Abattoir]

@Butler OffcourseSince you are going to bake anyway i'd recommend to create a separate low-polygon model of your shoe, using surface snapping with your highpoly as a reference so you don't have to guess smoothness too much, and try to reconstruct a "close approximation" without using subdivision, only adding what is strictly necessary and not going to be highlighted enough by the normal map.

[Butler Offcourse]

Hello @Kyrah Abattoir, thank you very much for your reply! 🙂 

So you are telling me to use the “close approximation” model as the main mesh model in SL and use the bake texture to give the smoothness that a “subdivision modifier” gives? Is it what you mean?

Lately, that I am interested in making stuff for SL, I have became like a geek clicking and inspecting anything I see that I like made my mesh, getting more ideas how many tris people used, how many textures they used...etc,  There was this shoe which looked wonderful, very detailed and when I checked the tris number, it was well above 100.000 tris!! 😱 (I guess it was linked )

I will also be making a low poly model to create different LoDs but it is once i am satisfied with the overall shape, proportions..etc of the shoe. 😊

[Kyrah Abattoir]

Pretty much, the extra data of your normal map makes up for the difference, and the high poly subdivided model essentially never touches SL.

 

[Aquila Kytori]

On 2/23/2021 at 1:29 PM, Butler Offcourse said:

I see that your viewport is split in two for the node editor for each shader, how is it possible? did you put it there in photoshop just to show?

Yes I copy and pasted the second material into the image using Gimp, I was hoping the dashed lines around the second material nodes would indicate that; 

 

On 2/23/2021 at 1:29 PM, Butler Offcourse said:

So I have the statics turned on in overlay options, and when I hide the feet (Ebody Flat Feet), it is telling me that I have 3.048 triangles. This is the number I should look at, right?

Yes. If you are in Object mode the triangle count is the number of tris of the objects in the viewport including those added by using the Subdivision modifier.

In Edit mode it is different. It only indicates the number of tris of the object you are editing and does not include those added by the Subdivision modifier.

 

On 2/24/2021 at 7:36 PM, Butler Offcourse said:

1400 tris and it looks fantastic!! Did you delete the interio faces that wont be visible? from the UV unwrap it does not seem so, but well, now that you told me this, it gives me a good number that I know that I should achieve! Well, When I added the piping on the opening, that pipeping is almost as complex as the rest of the shoe with 2k tris.

My workflow was a little different than yours.

I first modelled the outside uppers of the shoe (the parts coloured blue in the screenshot above, the one illustrating my UV unwrap) using as little geometry as i thought was needed. I wasn't  happy with the smoothness of some of the curves so added a Subdivision modifier with a level of 1 and it looked much better. I then emmediately Applied this modifier and then went around deleting /dissolving all the edge loops I decided were not necessary, using edge slide to even out some of the spacings. 

When happy with the outer faces of the  shoes uppers. I added a Solidify modifier, and applied that. Because I considered the inner faces less important I went around and deleted edge loops to reduce the poly count of inners. Also removed by merging vertices some of the polys inside the toe.

Next I added the inner and outer soles using a simple Ngon for each.

Extruded out the edge of the sole some and added the heel.

When all was done I edited both inner and outer sole, deleting the face of the Ngon and recreating the missing faces using as few polys as possible. This is why you see triangles in this part of the mesh. Triangles are not bad but should be avoided if possible because they break nice edge flow/loops, they can cause shading issues, and mess up bending when it comes to rigging/animation. You will often end up with a few tris when optimising, on flat surfaces of static meshes they will usually be perfectly fine.  Ngons are worse because you loose all control over that part of the mesh.

If Interested you can download my .blend file from here:   https://pasteall.org/blend/d00cec9b0441480cbb962f0e23a95698

I mentioned all that because as you did not apply your Subdivision modifier you were forced to create the other parts of the shoe as separate objects. A shoe like this only needs to be a single object. I believe your shoe is 5 objects at the moment ?

The Piping along the upper edge would need to be created separably, as you did, using curve and bevel but then it should be joined to the rest of the shoe and edited to reduce its poly count by ruthlessly selecting edge rings/loops and deleting / desolving them.

Perhaps you have other reasons for having the shoe as 5 objects ? If not I would advise you to save a copy of your .blend file then apply the modifiers and join all the parts together.

Then optimise the mesh by deleting / dissolving all the geometry, edge loops that you think you get away with. Now you are ready to UV unwrap.

When unwrapping you should aim to use as much of the UV space as possible. Wasted space is wasted pixels and we all know the more pixels the better the definition the texture can be

Here is an alternative layout of the "single island for shoes uppers". I personally, think that most pixels should be for  the outside surface of the shoe so in this 2nd UV layout the Outer uppers island has been scaled up and rotated to cover even more real estate. The inners uppers and lower sole have been scaled down because I would consider them less important.

The original UV unwrap suggestion:

 

and the second solutiuon :

 

I noticed that both Kyrah and Optimo have both suggested more seams and rebaking for even better coverage of the UV space .......... ideally you should try all 

 

Oh and one more thing ....... I like the little smiley logo inside the shoe but you have the text "Butler" running in the wrong direction ! The text should be running from heel to toe. Its only a little thing but it looks odd.  lol

Edited February 27, 2021 by Aquila Kytori

[Butler Offcourse]

Hello again! Thank you both to @Kyrah Abattoir and @Aquila Kytori for your replies, time and advices! Much appreciated, I am learning so much! 😊

@Kyrah Abattoir , wow the result looks wonderful and it would help me to have very good quality. The texture looks very crisp too, love it! Have you modelled the stitches as well or did you do it in photoshop, gimp..etc? When I add stitches, they do not look sharp, they look blurry once I upload. I have an other question as well, this would only work for people who has materials enabled, right? I mean, how would it look if they have it disabled? Which one is the wiser choice?  Thank you 🙃

@Aquila Kytori , thank you very much for sharing your model with me, looking at it answered some of my questions! Ok I am glad that I understood to read the statistics the right way, in fact i was alternating between object and edit mode to evaluate the total and singular tris numbers. Thank you! 

Interesting workflow and it is completely different than the one I use, but I am curious and I would love trying it as well. The reason that I do not apply the subdivision immediately, I get a little bit confused when I have too much vertexes to edit and when I edit the vertexes I am sometimes causing some nodes or loosing some smoothness. I know that I should use the proportional edit but I still have certain issues with it, especially on the scale, when I model a small object, I am having troubles with the proportional editing "brush" scale.  Tho I love the idea of adding the subdivision and then removing the loop cuts, especially the part about removing loop cuts ruthlessly 😂 

I also think that, this method permits me to have sharp edges where I want, between materials, avoid having little holes in their connection if they are not perfectly aligned and also makes me economise on double or useless faces like the one you have asked me on the other thread. So this is definitely something I should practice and learn. 🙃 Tho there is something I did not understand. Doing the inner and outer soles with Ngons. If I am not mistaken, Ngon is a face generated by 3 vertexes, so a triangle, so you created the inner and outer soles with a triangle in the beginning?

Actually yes, I am doing my best to avoid using triangles, but since my object will not be bending, on a shoe, I could may be get away with it if i needed to have certain triangles? Obviously the shading part would be a problem tho if it created issues but on invisible parts such as the interior of the shoe where the toes rest, would not be an huge issue. 

Yes, I did the shoe in 5 parts:

- Exterior and Interior General body, - insole, -sole, -heel, -pipeing

As I had explained it on the other post, I did it because I did not know I could separate the UV island materials and also I was thinking that this would make it easier to model different parts  and unwrap them but now that I have slightly more experience and knowledge then before, creating it with a single material could be nicer and I can see how applying the subdivision in an early stage could be useful here.  One more thing to practice and learn to do better stuff. 

I guess I could join the parts together by clicking on Ctrl+J or it was J, something like that but inside the model, when i go to edit mode, they would still be separated objects, so I should apply a Boolean as well? What is the advantage of joining them together at this stage that I had started modelling separately?

I like the second UV Unwrap proposition, as well! Wow now I have so much to experiment and see! Thank you! 🙃

Haha that smiley logo was just for fun! 😅 For a shoe like this I would definitely design a classy logo like Chanel or Gucci, I'd never put a logo that looks like written by me when I was 6 years old! 😅 But the position/rotation is important! Thank you! 😊

[Kyrah Abattoir]

8 minutes ago, Butler Offcourse said:

@Kyrah Abattoir , wow the result looks wonderful and it would help me to have very good quality. The texture looks very crisp too, love it! Have you modelled the stitches as well or did you do it in photoshop, gimp..etc? When I add stitches, they do not look sharp, they look blurry once I upload. I have an other question as well, this would only work for people who has materials enabled, right? I mean, how would it look if they have it disabled? Which one is the wiser choice?  Thank you 🙃

For smaller details like stitches I usually draw a mask & a bump map in Krita and integrate them into my blender material.

And yes, if you use normal/specular maps only people with ALM enabled will get the full effect. But unless policies have changed at Linden Lab the non-alm renderer is on its way out.

You can still bake "some" (not all or you will fight against the normal map) details into your diffuse map for those users.

My position, realistically, is that, if you can't run ALM, you are very unlikely to have the ram/vram required to support larger textures anyway.

As for your question about blurryness, this is something I'm still tweaking, but essentially... baking at your final resolution, rather than 2X/4x and then shrinking it down might look grainy in photoshop, but it will look fine in SL. Trust what Blender show you, and use temporary textures to double check in SL.

[Butler Offcourse]

Thank you very much @Kyrah Abattoir for your reply  

I had never heard of Krita, I always used photoshop and Affinity, but it looks very nice, let me check it! When you say you draw a mask and a bump map, I know more or less what the bump map looks like, I can figure that out but what is the mask map? Or do you mean the layer mask that you are using in your drawing app?

Well, this makes me think that I have to upgrade my computers, even tho they were both 3k+ laptops 4 and 5 years ago, with 4 gb Vram (GTX 980M on Windows and Radeon Pro 560 on the Macbook Pro) they are starting to struggle with the ALM on, damn.. lol, they both have 16 GB ram and i7 processors. But in this case, a 2021 mid range laptop would struggle too, no?

What do you mean baking at my final resolution? You mean 1024 pixels which is the upload limit of SL? Or Baking it like 4k, edit it and when you upload to SL, as long as I don't hit an errror telling me that the size is above the limit, let the SL shrink it for you? 

Edited February 27, 2021 by Butler Offcourse

[Kyrah Abattoir]

A mask is typically a black & white texture (but not necessarily) that you feed into your node graph to combine multiple paths into one on a per UVpixel basis, you obviously need to give "some kind" of unwrap to your high polygon mesh if you plan to do that on it.

Example below

 

Edited February 27, 2021 by Kyrah Abattoir

[Butler Offcourse]

Thank you very much @Kyrah Abattoir for your reply! Much appreciated! 😊

Oh basicly it works like a layer mask in a painting app, black parts hiding and white parts showing. Thank you very much, the nodes in Blender are the part of a deep ocean to dive! lol But I will, sooner or later! 🙃