Playing around with "Universal Low Poly High heel 10cm"

[wolgade]

I really like this one http://www.makehumancommunity.org/clothes/universal_low_poly_high_heel_10cm.html. It's low poly but elegant, which I consider hard to do. It looks like something a woman would like to wear. If I tried to model this, I'd probably end up with something that looks like these concrete boots gangsters put onto you before they drown you in the river.

So I decided to give this asset a decent material. First thing I noticed was the uv layout.

There's a seam straight on the top of the shoe. This will cause trouble with a lot of textures, because it's visible and no real world shoe has a seam here. Let's change this. I moved the seam to the heel. That's where real world shoes have it, so it's not a problem if it's visible.

And this is what I got so far after some texture work:

But here we run into another problem:

Heavy uv stretching. Reason: The object got unwrapped in the foot rest pose. The heel will never be posed this way in any render. It should be unwrapped with the foot pose applied. And this is where I'm stuck. How can this be done? It's easy to import and export OBJ-Files and keep the vertex order. It's also easy to edit an OBJ-File and just exchange the lines that start with "vt" (the uv layout), but there's no way to export the posed heel from makehuman and preserve vertex order.

[o4saken]

This looks awesome from the side view, excellent work!

I had a look at what you were meaning, and im guessing that you mean the imported shoe is toes pointing straight, where you really need that bend in front but this is then where it is stretching..

Could this not be fixed in blender? importing the obj gives you an unposed shoe, so if i had to guess another method i would say export a model wearing the shoe, then import into blender pose it, select the shoe and convert object to mesh, now you can delete the model and only have the posed shoe.. which can now be unwrapped and textured...

[wolgade]

This looks awesome from the side view, excellent work!

Thanks. You'd be surprised about the very basic shader setup. Diffuse, Glossy, Fresnel. That's it.

im guessing that you mean the imported shoe is toes pointing straight,

No, the lines on the soles should be evenly thick, have an even distance, they should be parallel and most important they should be straight lines, not curves.

importing the obj gives you an unposed shoe,

That's what I did. This way you can preserve vertex order.

export a model wearing the shoe, then import into blender pose it,

... and at this stage we loose vertex order and all the magic stuff makeclothes did to the asset. That's exactly the problem.

now you can delete the model and only have the posed shoe.. which can now be unwrapped and textured...

And then you have to run the whole makeclothes workflow again. Not so easy for heels.

[duststorm]

Very nice looking!

By the way, there's no shame in reusing topologies (but check the license of the original, and adhere to it, of course). Modeling topology is about 50% of the time spent on the model.
I also gladly reuse my topologies to model new things quicker. For example I first modeled the sport shoes in MH, and then reused that topology (with a few loop cuts added) for modeling the elegant shoes. It saved me quite a bit of time.
With one female shoe topology you could probably create many good looking variations, just by cleverly inserting (or removing) loops where needed.

[wolgade]

Very nice looking!

Thanks.

By the way, there's no shame in reusing topologies (but check the license of the original, and adhere to it, of course).

I intended to call the topic "Playing around with grinsegold's "Universal Low Poly High heel 10cm", but this was simply too long. I placed a link to the asset, so I considered the attribution part of CC-BY to be fulfilled. Am I wrong here? Should I place a text on any rendered image?

With one female shoe topology you could probably create many good looking variations, just by cleverly inserting (or removing) loops where needed.

That's exactly what I thought when I saw this asset. The whole idea behind creating the material was to make the potential of this asset visible.

But I still haven't found a smart solution for the uv problem. This problem also exists if you model a high heel on your own. Let me explain:

1. You model your high heel. You have to do this in the rest pose of the foot. At this stage your asset will look a bit weird. A real high heel looking this way is asking for replacement.

2. You uv-unwrap your asset. And this is wrong! The foot pose will introduce uv stretching later. Any mesh deformation with an armature causes uv stretching, but this case is special. One could consider the posed heel as the heels rest pose. You don't want the heel to look good in the human rest pose, but with the foot pose applied.

3. You use make clothes to do the magic. Your heel has to be in human rest pose at this stage.

I think, here's a gap in the tool chain. A way to apply the foot pose in blender for proper uv-unwrapping. It can't be done before you run make clothes, because make clothes creates all the bone weights you need for posing. It can't be done afterwards, because you can't export a posed heel from MH while keeping vertex order of your asset. Any OBJ export from MH includes the human mesh.

[duststorm]

I don't think credits need to be watermarked on the picture, no.
As long as the credits are given when the image is published (as was done on this forum) it's ok.
It's mainly important that if these shoes would be distributed as a MH asset, it should come with a clear readme giving credit to the original author, also the license metadata, entered in MakeClothes, should be properly adapted to CC-BY-SA and mention the original author in the author field (additionally you can add your own name if you want)

[duststorm]

By the way, I don't understand the problem with the rest pose.

As far as I can see, you can follow the following procedure:
1) load the correction pose on your human (make sure it has the default mesh)
2) quickly rig your shoe to the skeleton manually: add a skeleton modifier to it, link it to the default skeleton, and weight all shoe vertices 100% to the foot bone (you do this manually, as you usually would)
4) Your human will now be in its foot corrected pose
5) In the armature modifier options of the shoe, select the icon "Use modifier in edit mode" and "apply pose to editing cage during editmode"

if you now go into edit mode on the shoes, they will remain in their posed mode

6) you probably want to enable the same settings on the human

Now work on your shoes

7) undo the options set in 5 and 6
8) remove the vertex group used for rigging from shoes
9) restore human to rest pose
10) use makeClothes as you normally would (with human now in rest pose)

[wolgade]

I might have a lack of knowledge here, but I'm willing to get enlighted.

1) load the correction pose on your human (make sure it has the default mesh)

The human which is loaded by MakeClothes? How? It doesn't even have an armature. Sorry, I might sound completely stupid, but I really don't know, what human you are referring to. I always used the human from MakeClothes for reference.

[grinsegold]

This thread nicely shows the difficulties of making high heels for mh. I'm playing with this issue for months now, and still got no real solution. I even tried duststorm's approach of exporting a default human with an armature as a substitute for the makecloth avatar (100% female, default armature, no eyes, no feet on ground, helper geometry on), but although it has the same vertex count you can notice that it's slightly off compared to the makecloth avatar.

Also my goal is to have heels that get deformed also by the toes. Parenting them 100% to the DEF_foot-bone can only be a workaround.
My personal solution atm is to export my model without shoes, but with a cloth that consists of only a small plane inside the body, which is pointing at the bvh "10cm", so the exported model will be in high heel pose after imporing it into blender.

The bones are where they should be, and this high heel pose is the rest pose.

Now i can model a shoe onto that, or append a pair of heels from my basemesh-library and adjust them to the foot.
For now i gave up making shoes that can be exported from MH. Too much weirdness. It's far easier to make them from scratch inside blender with a sole template, or tweaking a given model around the foot. Maybe one day there will be a makecloth avatar with an armature and an "apply as rest pose" button, resulting in an easy workflow for high heels without unwanted deformations and full functionality in terms of having toe control.

[wolgade]

Thanks grinsegold for sharing your workflow. After reading duststorm's post I had the feeling to be too stupid to find and click a checkbox in MakeClothes. As I guessed, making high heels isn't easy at all and my remark about a gap in the tool chain isn't completely wrong.

The bones are where they should be, and this high heel pose is the rest pose. Now i can model a shoe onto that,

And after you have finished modeling, you have to apply an inversed foot pose to get the feet and the shoes deformed to match the human rest pose?