Making Your First Model Part 9
Modeling The Shoes

Hi guys! Before getting started, I wanted to point out that I fixed the crease in Camila’s chest!

I selected the faces that were giving me trouble, deleted them, and used “f” to make faces out of the edges that remained!

Alright, now on to accessories!

Now, let’s get something out of the way.

Camila doesn’t wear stockings. She doesn’t wear socks. Her feet are as free as can be . . . Well, as free as they can be in those killer heels!

But that brings up a problem – you and I, we are n00bs. Toes are hard. If we try our hardest and make jacked up toes, it will detract from the model as a whole. So, what can we do?

Simple! Modify the design slightly.

Earlier, I pointed out that I didn’t want to bother with the cutouts. It was more pain than it was worth! And toes are the same exact thing. Much more pain than it is worth. But the thing about the cutouts is that all we had to do was not make them. There are a few examples of Yesi drawing her without them, even.

But there are no examples of Camila wearing stockings. So, what can we do? My first instinct is to pull in inspiration from Camila’s “Lucid” design. We can take the concept of her dark leggings and flip them over to make them tights! (Okay, full disclosure, but I really got the idea from Bella Goth. Deep red dress and dark tights? How does that NOT look awesome!?)

Doing it will be easy and even easier to change back to a naked leg. Just select the parts you want to be covered with the tights and assign a new material!

Then it’s just a question of how much leg do we show?

The easiest thing to do would just to be select the entire bottom half with no concern for topography. But that would be a little lame.

My thinking is that if they come a little lower than the slit in the side of the dress, they’ll only be shown when the skirt physics kick in. It will also have the advantage of being vaguely knee-high.

But we run into a rather strange problem .  . .

We can’t just pick a spot and assign a material as is! Well, unless weirdly positioned clothing items are your thing . . . Then you’d be pretty pleased.

It wasn’t too big of a deal to fix . . . and since it would be mostly hidden by the dress, it didn’t seem like too big of a problem.

I simply selected some edges, rotated them, resized them . . . and was left with this:

I selected everything underneath that line, and then I assigned it a new material.

Oh . . . those shoes? Funny you might ask . . .

Before I started writing this, I made this video…

I love text tutorials, so instead of just leaving up a video where I devolve into humming to myself and pointing out that those shoes belong on RuPaul’s Drag Race, I’m going to take screenshots and explain them as best I can. Without further ado . . .

Shoes

So, of course, I started with my normal, paranoid shtick of making a cube to make sure I got the mirror modifier working.

After insuring that the mirror modifier was working, I added a plane. I then resized, rotated, and positioned the plane underneath Camila’s foot.

Then I realized I needed to scootch-over the reference image just a bit before moving further. After that, it was time to loop cut and adjust. I put a loop cut right under the heel of the foot so that I could make the sole of the shoe cling more tightly to her foot.

From that point, I simply extruded the plane until the entire underside of her foot was covered.

Of course I added a subsurface modifier . . . Because that’s just the kind of modeler I am! But regardless, once I made the sole, I extruded it down and rotated the extrusion so that, in one of my favorite MMD phrases ever, “her feet could feel the floor.”

After that, I knew I needed to adjust it so that she could have a killer stilettos. So I selected the face underneath the heel and lifted it up.

Next, was the fun part. I extruded that face down to create the stiletto.

I extruded twice and sized each time. This left me with a very shapeless object, so I added loop cuts and sized those loop cuts to give me this:

Loop Tools and SubSurf Modifier

Ok, let’s take a short  break from that specific shoe to talk about why Loops Tools and the SubSurf Modifier work together in the most pleasing way possible.

In a completely unrelated Blend file, let’s make a cube and add SubSurf modifier to it.

That doesn’t look like a cube at all!

But you can see the actual front face of the cube outlined in front of the mesh.

Now, how can we make the cube look like a cube while still being nice and subsurfaced? Loop cuts!

If you were to add a loop cut and move it up towards the top of the cube, this would happen:

As you can see, pushing the loop cut towards the edge makes the mesh start to look like a square again.

Just adding a few more loop cuts and sizing them leaves us with this interesting geometry:

This little aside was just to tell you about how cool it is to play with Loop Cuts and the SubSurf modifier at the same time. It’s how I shaped Camila’s shoes!

Back to the shoes!

Just by playing with loop cuts and moving the edges around, I ended up with this:

One thing to note is that I gave no flips about the mesh for the foot and the mesh for the shoe intersecting. Once it’s imported into MMD, it will be no-nevermind.

If you watch the video, you’ll see that there was quite a bit of time between extruding the stiletto and now. I jumped ahead because there’s only so many times you can say “Ya’know loop cuts? I love loop cuts. Use loop cuts!”

Also, I deeply apologize to anyone who has been yelling at their screen for me to flip my normals. I tend to forget to do it until I’m done with the part.

And then . . . We come to the straps.

Let me be completely honest – I didn’t know what I was doing with the straps. For the first, I extruded one face on each side. Then I tried to make them meet in the middle. It wasn’t a fun endeavour. For the second, I only extruded one and tried to use “Merge Vertices” to get it to connect to the side of the shoe. Also not fun.

I feel like I should give you more dirt on the straps. But there’s not much more to say than “I did it poorly. I have no real advice on straps.”

But hopefully, I’ll have advice next time! Tune in next time when we take care of the rest of her accessories!