Hello All

Sorry for the lapse in posts (again). But.. School is back in and I’ll be posting again regularly.  I’m looking for requests for tutorials and I will be posting new types of videos.  This semester I am co-teaching Architectural Drawing + Representation.  This class serves as an intro to using computer to further the design process.  So, I will be posting videos on a lot basics and intro issues.  I’ll be posting Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Bridge tutorials. The second class I will be teaching is titled Orchestration, this class will focus on getting students to work with fabricators to learn the and explore co-authoring and broaden the digital communication skills. in this workshop students will use aplucations like Revit, Inventor, and Navis Works. Video for those applications should start pop up shortly.

For now here are 2 videos from from talks Steve Sanderson and I gave at Siggraph.  Steve spoke on a complexity panel and I spoke on panel titled Craftsmanship.

Steve:

Me:

ShareThis

This is the fist personal project I post on this site. I’ve been really weary of doing this since this site really is not about personal promotion. But i figure if I’m showing all these techniques folks shoudl be able to see how they are applied. So i think my strategy for posting work on Design ReForm is going to be based on “How To” not so much about the project but how i did them. If anyone wants to know more about the project I’ll link back to my personal blog where i post my past works (not many these days since I’m out of school and work at SHoP - lots of NDAs)

So, I modeled this Shoe about 3 or 4 years ago for Tronic Studio (Motion graphics firm run by Columbia grad, they do amazing work, and they are good people) for a web commercial they were working on . The entire shoe was poly modeled in 3D Studio Max. It took me about a 8 weeks of off and on modeling. As much as i enjoyed this project this is something i don’t think i would like to do again. That might be partly because i had to learn Brazil to render it. I didn’t know it so i was at a bit of a lose. I had been focusing my rendering efforts on Vray and Mental Ray.

Here is a link to the video : nike_flight

They way i went about modeling the shoe was pretty straight forward. I had a sample shoe (totally different colors, which made it tricky later on) which i took Photos of and set up a modeling studio in 3ds Max . From there i just started tackling piece by piece. I knew they were thinking of doing an exploded axo if the shoe so i had model the inside also. Once i had all the photos of the exterior of the shoe i took the shoe apart and took pictures of the inside parts of it as well.

Here you can start to see some of the wire frame of the model. I modeled the stitching on all of the shoe. almost none of it was texture mapped. Only the micro textures and the snake skin looking pattern on the back of the shoe. To do the stitching i modeled a single stitch, then extracted curves from the shoe then animated the stitch along that curve. Once that was key framed properly i took a snapshot of the animation and had all the stitches. I used instances in case stitches were to thick i would not have to redo the snapshot.

I also has to model the shoes Sole, This part was probably the easiest since the shaped were the most tectonic. To get as little lenses distortion as possible i scanned the bottom of the shoe to model the sole. It also helped and system of measure for the rest of the shoe. Just in case the images were slightly distorted. I’ll post some more screen shots when i get around to opening up that model again,

ShareThis