Aquila Kytori

Add a few more loops cuts in the piping where the radius of the curves are smaller: https://pasteall.org/blend/fc1fe20cd2064fdab230db08f7015405

I am never going to be able to catch up on all the questions you ask ! lol This is more of a comment........... To reduce the tri count further fill in the faces by hand ........... For each letter of the text select only the edge vertices that really matter and make a copy - new object of these edge vertices. Then fill in the missing faces by hand. Doing this I managed to get the tri count down to 585. I also noticed in your Ballerina WIP.blend file that you don't have the Auto Smooth enabled, ( see screenshot above). I usually enable that option if I have smooth shaded faces on my model. When enabled you may find you need to play around with the slider to get best results. Also with Auto Smooth enabled it is sometimes useful to Add a Weighted Normals modifier: The more pixels that you can map the UV's to the sharper will appear the texture. Thats one of the reasons why it was suggested earlier that you should waste as little UV space as possible. And also why some creators use more than 1 1024² texture on a shoe !!

I only just saw your new posts ............ I will try to answer the other questions this evening but for now : Its all to do with Poles. Poles are where edges come together. Usually when modelling with quads, its mostly 4 edges coming together and you have no problem selecting or adding complete edge loops. But when you have any thing other than 4 edges meeting at a single vertex, ( its called an E- Pole when more than 4 and a N-Pole when only 3, I had to look up the correct terminology ) the edge loops get stopped at that pole. Check your model and you will find the responsible E pole :

Next time, To have more control of the added edge loops try hiding a couple of faces before adding. See screenshots below :

Good morning 🙂 This is the correct topology if you are wanting a more versatile shoe base model. You just need to fix the shading problems Can you share your .blend file so that I can have a play with it ? Just copy and paste the shoe and the foot into a new clean .blend file, a file without all the materials and textures. Edit: Yes it is looking better Adding an edge loop around openings is often a good idea. The edge loops where the piping joins to the shoe, have you tried Marking it Sharp ?

I had assumed that you were doing this way from the very beginning. Have you been using box modeling instead? That then reminded me of Gaia Clary's Shoe Quest tutorials. Its both text and videos. If you haven't seen these before they are well worth watching. I always use vertex modeling, just because thats the way I learnt to mesh model but I find something very elegant in the box modeling method. https://blog.machinimatrix.org/shoe-quest/ Your shoe is looking very "clean" now. You just need to reduce the poly count a little by deleting some edge loops : In some instances you may find it helpful to edge slide neighbouring loops before deleting so you don't loose the shape. Tweaking is just taking the time to get every vertex to what you believe is the correct position. In this case often using Proportional editing, Edge and vertex sliding, and just generally pushing and pulling at individual vertices as you go along. The following is my modelling workflow from start to finish. This time by simplifying it a little, the tri count is down to 1300. Again I would suggest watching Gaia's tutorial (link above) where she gets her shoe down to less than 1000 ! I use https://compresspng.com/ to compress images before adding them here. Not really a problem. But ............... Before optimizing, you could delete the sole, insole faces. Then in side view, Wireframe mode, use Edge Slide ( G G ) to align edges on a posing sides. After Deleting some of these vertical edges for optimization go back and fill in the sole and insole again. Its a never ending process isn't it. 😄

I didn't have much of a problem with the this part of the model, perhaps because my front edge of the opening appears to be higher up towards the base of the toes than your seems to be? In such a model there is always alot of tweaking to be done. Its just the nature of the beast. Yes ! I can't think of a good reason why you don't start again. After all isn't that what this thread is all about ? For your two threads I have made 3 different models, My original, the one in the image above. A second one where I made a copy of each step so that I could later take screenshots showing my workflow (but decided it wasn't necessary any more). And a third where I only did the outer shell but following your edge flow to check it out.( images for my post this morning). If you were in my class I would insist that you model both edge flows. 😄

Instead of using a plane to increase the objects BB dimensions, you could use a triangle. Aand instead of giving it a separate material etc you could snap one vertex of the triangle to another vertex of the same triangle creating a degenerate triangle. This degenerate triangle (looks like a single edge) will not be visible when the object is rezzed inworld so no need for the extra material. Another method that works in Blender but I don't know how it would be done in 3Dmax is to use a single vertex ........ see this earlier post where the Bounding box of a little button is increased using this method.

This morning I tried to recreate your edge flow for the toe and found it perfectly OK . So forget my earlier image where I suggested you try redirecting some of the edges. I think we can agree this does not look good : I think the only thing wrong with your base model before subdivision modifier is not having enough longitudinal edges at the front. I have to agree with Kyrah on your edge reductions. I don't see the point of that short vertical edge in the 2 down to 1 reduction: Or the the need for the extra quad in the middle of your 3 to 1 reduction: or even this :

When exporting to Collada, top right hand corner of the export window is a little gear icon which opens the export options. See screen-shots below : The "Copy" option will save a copy of the image texture into the same folder as you are saving the Collada file. In the SL mesh Uploader put a check against the Include Textures option. The Textures will now add $L10 to the upload cost.

I think it would be worthwhile to add a few more longitudinal edge loops at the toe to smooth out the piping's curve some. And something else that is bothering me ............ Have a look at the two images in my previous post. I seem to have alot more geometry in the front of the shoe than you have in yours yet the tri counts are very similar, both around 2000. If you still have my blend file have a look where you are using more geometry than I have. If you don't then you can download it again, this time with piping from here : https://pasteall.org/blend/5043da453d97408ab23d7c04048bdff7 and that is me done for the day I am working afternoon shifts this week.

Good morning While you were doing that I was making screenshots explaining exactly that and then using the snap tool to snap the vertices together. But I guess they aren't needed anymore I will post my shoe with piping anyhow : Your shoe still looks like it has some issues with the shading. I think perhaps you should next be working on cleaning up the edge flow to try and remove the distortions? it is difficult to say how exactly but perhaps something like in the image below, removing the red edge loop completely and directing the green one around the shoe?

No. If you joined all 5 objects with Ctrl J then you would still have 5 materials on the joined object in Blender and 5 material faces when rezzed inworld. The thing you have to take care about is that all the objects have the same name in the list of UV's before joining them. In the screenshots below 3 objects, Cube_Red, Cube_Blue and Cube_Green. Each cube has its own single material assigned to it, Red, Green and Blue. Each has been UV Unwrapped but each has the same UV name, UVMap. First screenshot illustrates the above : We select all three objects and join them with Ctrl J so that they become a single object : One Object, named Cube_Blue (because it was Cube_Blue that was the last selected when selecting the three.) All three materials are still assigned as before. There is only one UV map in the list. All is good. In the next example everything is as before except that each object had a UV map with a different name. (before joining). Now, after joining there are three UV maps for this object. A mesh object for SL can only have one UV map and up to 8 materiel faces. What happens if we upload this new single object with the 3 UV maps ? When rezzed we will find that the object still has 3 selectable and tintable faces but only one of them will be able to have a texture correctly mapped to it. In the example below the object was exported with UVMap_Red selected and it is this material face that has the correct mapping. The other 2 material faces have thier UV's all mapped to the UV space coordinate X=0 Y=0. Walking about with shoes made as a single object or shoes as a link_set of 5 objects ................hmmmm ? I think I would pass that question along to a lag specialist, someone like @ChinRey

@Kyrah Abattoir You mean this ................?

In mesh modelling an Ngon is a polygon with more than 4 edges/sides. Triangle 3, Quad 4, Ngon anything more than 4. "N" is any number more than 4 and "gon" = sides. Why Fill in the soles with Ngons ? Because i'm lazy. 🙂 And I wanted the insole to appear raised up a little to indicate it is not part of the inners. Having the insole as an Ngon (a single face) makes it very easy to insert an edge loop with an even offset close to the outer edge. Below is the workflow but with all the other parts of the shoe hidden: Ctrl+J No, no booleans. Joining just would make sense in my workflow........... and you are going to join them all into a single object at some point aren't you? Before joining make sure that each objects UV map has the same name. all the same name results in a single UP map after joining. If they have different names then there will be more than one UV map in the list of UV's after joining.

I have to ask ............... why has the shoe's UV's 3 "sole" Islands ? What is the island at the bottom right hand corner for ?

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; 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. 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

I haven't tried Blenderkit but checked out how it maps the texture to objects: From the Blender Manuel / Blenderkit page: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/addons/3d_view/blenderkit.html " Auto-Map Add cube mapping UV to the object after drag-and-drop. This allows most materials to be applied instantly to any mesh. BlenderKit generates a new UV map called ‘automap’ and doesn’t replace your previous UV maps. It also resets the texture space of the target object to (1, 1, 1) which enables most procedural materials to have correct scaling. " After adding a material using Blenderkit has the projection method been changed from Flat to Box in the image texture node? What is cube mapping ? From https://exposeacademy.com/5-methods-of-uvw-box-mapping-in-blender-2-8x/ " " Well, basically, it is a method of applying 2D images or also known as textures onto the surfaces of 3D objects by projecting the texture from 6 different directions, top, bottom, front, back, right and left. This mapping method is very useful for quickly texturing box-like objects. ". " The quote from the Blender Manuel suggests it " doesn’t replace your previous UV maps " There seems to be an option in the Material menu of Blenderkit to disable the Automap option, have you tried unchecking it ? Above screenshot is from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSay3yaBWV0 2:27 edit: hmmmmm ..... or perhaps it is just a search option ?? you can let us know.

Yes a UV mapping problem. (Switching UV maps) Check to see if you have more than one UV map. Object Data Properties Panel > UV Maps. If so you need to tell Blender which map to use. Instead of starting your material node setup with a Texture Coordinate node use a UV Map node where you can indicate which UV map to use for the material.

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

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 🙂 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 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.

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. 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

I just did a quick test. I exported from Blender an Object with 10 materials assigned to it. When rezzed inworld the single object was now a 2 "prim" linkset. On the positive side : there was no visible seam at the join so any expected vertex normals issues had been taken care of by the SL mesh Uploader. Negative point : When the SL uploader divides your model like this you loose all control over the Physics/collision surfaces of the objects in the new linkset. When rezzed, the Physics Shape Type options are only Convex Hull or None. (no prim option).

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.

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. 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.