High Heels

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High Heels

Postby punkduck » Wed Apr 17, 2019 7:19 pm

This article is about a few further desperate tries to create high heels ... Creating high heeled shoes for a MakeHuman character is not simple. :?

As far as I know we have a lot of different methods to achieve this.

1) Hiding or re-create geometry of the feet.

Create a high heel shoe (in form of a boot) and throw away the feet with a delete group. If it is a sandal shoe, remodel the foot.

Examples:

Elvaerwyns "Knee High Heel Boots1"

http://www.makehumancommunity.org/clothes/elvs_knee_high_heel_boots1.html

My "heel sandals"" with remodelled feet:

http://www.makehumancommunity.org/clothes/heel_sandals.html

2) Using a pose:

highheels1.jpg


Model a shoe in flat pose (1). Then use a pose in MakeHuman when you render it. Not to destroy the form of the heel, you need rigid groups (2). It is rather hard to predict the bending of the metatarsal bones and the result might be not what you want.Especially the boundary of the two rigid groups is a problem.

The pictures show the rather unconventional way to create shoes ... this is the posed result:
http://www.makehumancommunity.org/clothes/elvs_6in_stilletto_pumps1.html

Furthermore the poses using the foot bones do not take in consideration, that the Achilles tendon will not fold, like in the picture (3) and women will not break their toes like this.

Although I don't think that these shoes are in any form healthy .. :?

3) Using a target:

Since my friend Elvaerwyn had created some (or a lot of) shoes for other systems she was not very happy to convert one-by-one with method number 2. The modelling in wrong position is not very natural and the shoes in (2) from Elvaerwyn needed to be converted by makeclothes at least 30 times until I was happy with the result.

Meanwhile I learned, that a t-posed dummy also works, when I create clothes. So why not using a target which simulates different heel-sizes?

First idea was to use a pose in Blender. But even when I used rigid group, the shoes are distorted (e.g. stretched or slanted). When I tried that on a unposed body, it worked.

So I first did a target for the rather extrem 15cm heels. No broken toes and the Achilles tendon is also still there. I had to make sure, that above ankle nothing will be moved at all. This region will be unposed and later used for the rigid groups.

You can download this target from here:
http://www.makehumancommunity.org/target/high_heels_footpose.html

Then I took the same (original) pair of shoes and tried it again on a dummy with the target included.

highheels2.jpg


I first posed one shoe near the heel, then changed the shape-key "heels" until it fits. Then I changed the shoe, that it really fits to the foot (also used delete-groups to hide the toes and sole later, for this demo I did not do it.)

After that I checked that origin is at center and applied rotation and scale. In the last step I mirrored the shoe and assigned the rigid vertex groups and pressed the makeclothes button.

In MakeHuman there are only two steps, first you have to load the shoes and then you have to pose the slider.

highheels3.jpg


These shoes also work with e.g. stockings. So for all those guys demanding that in the past, here we go ...

Limits:

Although I had good results with the shoes on the standard female, other proportional changed females (especially proportions slider) will not always work a 100%. At least for the sole and toe-box (if available) delete groups should be used.

Posing an allready posed foot will also lead into trouble.

For a 100% solution we need special helpers, which aren't distorted but which should nevertheless resize with e.g. the proportional slider.
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Re: High Heels

Postby RobBaer » Thu Apr 18, 2019 7:12 am

As always, very nicely explained. Thanks for sharing.
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Re: High Heels

Postby wolgade » Thu Apr 18, 2019 8:33 pm

Interesting approach. High heels might be painful anyway, but especially with MH.

You talk about a missing helper. How about the joints helper (small cubes)? Couldn't they be used as long as the wideness of the foot doesn't change? Ok, this wouldn't solve the problem with the achilles tendon, but this problem is not specific to high heels.

http://www.makehumancommunity.org/content/lie_pensive_01.html
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Re: High Heels

Postby punkduck » Sat Apr 20, 2019 10:42 am

Hi Wolgade ...

1) For a rigid group we need only 3 vertices. So we have to decide which one we would take from the joints. And then have a to look how these joint-cubes are deformed when you pose the character ...

2) rigid groups do not equally scale in all directions. They scale independently in x, y, z direction. Elvaerwyn was so kind to send me the examples again, so I can show them here. I don't want to deprive the community of the following wonderful examples:

funny_results.jpg


Before we both got mad, I decided the way with the target and the rigids near ankle region. Although, I know the current limits. For a good working algorithm I need a different kind of scaling (or helper directly on the ground) which is not yet available.
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Re: High Heels

Postby MTKnife » Sun Apr 21, 2019 2:17 am

First of all, this is a great effort. I really appreciate the way the heels target deforms the calves to make it look like a model is actually wearing heels.

Now for the bad part....With the strap-back and lace-back shoes, the right shoe ends up in the wrong position on anything but an unmodified model. Interestingly, this is not true of the studded shoes--for them, the right shoe's position is right on. However, even with these, on one of the two models I tried, the shoes didn't scale correctly, leaving her toes ending about where the toe boxes start.
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Re: High Heels

Postby punkduck » Sun Apr 21, 2019 7:49 am

MTKnife wrote:
Now for the bad part....With the strap-back and lace-back shoes, the right shoe ends up in the wrong position on anything but an unmodified model. Interestingly, this is not true of the studded shoes--for them, the right shoe's position is right on. However, even with these, on one of the two models I tried, the shoes didn't scale correctly, leaving her toes ending about where the toe boxes start.


There are some problems, one might be simple. If you use rigid groups inside the area where the body mesh is deformed you will get the same result as before. That's a problem we can check. The other problem is more complicated. The simplest way to make the character more attractive is the proportional slider ... in my case then the feet peek through the shoes now. So we need at least one or two corrective targets I guess. (feet length and widht maybe). At least I can create them, test them and upload them ...

The problem is, that we try to simulate a non-existent helper at the moment. In normal case best would be a bounding-box (or two, one for heel, one for toe-box) for each foot. Like the discussion about wings and tail about the OpenSim/SL world we then have to rework all existing targets - or - will allow targets to work only on the meshes they are designed for.
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Re: High Heels

Postby MTKnife » Mon Apr 22, 2019 2:05 am

It wouldn't solve the scaling problem, but you could solve the two-feet problem (not only the offset, but some posing problems as well) by making the two shoes into two different pieces of clothing. It should even be possible in principle to modify the interface so that if a piece of clothing is added and a particular flag is present in the MHCLO file, a second piece of clothing (probably in the same directory, but with a special file extension, so that it doesn't show up in the clothes listing--say, "MHCLO2") is loaded automatically.

Actually, if you separate the clothing item between feet, it would make sense to separate the target as well: that would enable poses where, say, one foot is on the ground and the other isn't.
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Re: High Heels

Postby punkduck » Mon Apr 22, 2019 7:07 pm

MTKnife wrote:It wouldn't solve the scaling problem, but you could solve the two-feet problem (not only the offset, but some posing problems as well) by making the two shoes into two different pieces of clothing. It should even be possible in principle to modify the interface so that if a piece of clothing is added and a particular flag is present in the MHCLO file, a second piece of clothing (probably in the same directory, but with a special file extension, so that it doesn't show up in the clothes listing--say, "MHCLO2") is loaded automatically.

Actually, if you separate the clothing item between feet, it would make sense to separate the target as well: that would enable poses where, say, one foot is on the ground and the other isn't.


Well, the reason for that was, that two pairs of heels from Elv were accidentally assigned to the same rigid group of one foot. She already fixed it in the assets.

Meanwhile I have created a lot of targets which help the feet fit into these shoes. At least my girls are all able now to wear a pair of heels, even without deleting faces, see image below.
I will send a copy to Elvaerwyn before we will put them into the assets.

Elvaerwyn sent me a collection with more extreme characters, partly anime or zombie-like (nearly works, but because of very thin legs it is problematic), a stone-age one (works, but looks a bit disturbing) and a really corpulent one (does not work, the feet are hovering above the shoes).

Unfortunately we need the double amount of sliders because every target (also increase and decrease) must be separate for the custom folder. It was planned to change this (one of those famous TODO comments in the code). Well that's a nice exercise for me in the future, also to sort the sliders or otherwise use a json file, like in the "official" tabs ... ;)

heeltargets-test.png


to be continued ...
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Re: High Heels

Postby punkduck » Sun Apr 28, 2019 9:47 pm

Meanwhile all targets are uploaded. If you want to use them, best to put them all together in one sub-folder named "heels" in the "custom" directory. The whole procedure is a bit like trial an error to fit the shoes.

But it is the only way without a new helper or creating the shoes backwards deformed.

Usually feet in especially the toe-box region are deformed when wearing heels. So a pose created by bones is normally not very natural. And the bones cannot be used then, because the toes have to stay in the toe-box :lol:
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Re: High Heels

Postby MTKnife » Mon Apr 29, 2019 5:04 am

That's much better. It's still hard to get the toes to "peep" as far as they should, and on the model I've been playing with, the shoe seems too wide, but it's a pretty big improvement.

One thing I've just noticed is that the studded heels seem to be rotated a bit inward.
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