Modeling the One | A Personal Project

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Modeling the "ONE"

- A Personal Project -

Project Description

In this personal project I challenged myself to 3d modeling and texturing a Jordan Air from 1985 to a photorealistic level. I wanted it look used and worn-out like a pair of Jordans you often see being auctioned.

Tools Used: Blender, Houdini, Adobe Substance Designer; Adobe Substance Painter, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop

The Workflow - Modeling/Sculpting/Simulating/Texturing/Rendering

The challenges of modeling a shoe mainly result from shoes being neither solely soft nor hardsurfaced objects. This in-between creates the necessity to deploy a great variety of techniques.

Using Blenders intuitive modeling tools I was able to create the base shapes of the shoe. All parts are separately created on top of each other. That together with a strict quad-mesh approach makes the model flexible for different use cases.

With the base mesh finished I started to sculpt the midrange details like dents and folds. In Houdini I used the sculpted parts to point deform the corresponding parts of the base mesh thereby maintaining the clean topology. Finer details were then sculpted on top of the deformed base mesh and baked into normal maps using Mantra.

To create the cloth effect of the flap I used different Vellum simulations. Using the Vellum brush I was able to art direct the folds to my liking. One mayor challenge I faced was to make it look like the seams penetrate the leather parts. Because of the scale of the seams sculpting was not an option. By offsetting and animating the seams in normal direction away form the model I could use them as colliders in a Vellum-Sim as showcased below. Additionally the laces and the flap with the stiched logo were created using vellum.

For texturing I used a blend of different techniques and sources. Since all renderings were done in Solaris using Karma XPU and MaterialX I used VEX shaders for the more complex material setups. The baked out texure maps from these setups were than imported into the MaterialX networks. For the logos and more specific patterns of the sole and cloth I used Substance Designer. By additonally mixing in some materials I could find on Adobe Substance and Quixel I could create the look I was aming for.

As mentioned above rendering was done using Solrais and Karma XPU taking advantage of building a solid network to quickly iterate through different shots and lighting setups. The image sequences were put together in After Effects were I did the edit and animations.

Vellum simulations