Day 94: Creating Prim Shoes Part 1 (Sandals)

Im going to be teaching a class on making a pair of prim heels at the New Citizens Plaza. The class will be on Sundays at 3PM SL/Linden/PST. The classes will start on Jan 7, 2007, after New Year.

There have been several requests for me to write about making shoes. So I thought I should write it down and make it (somewhat) consistent with the live class. This will be a 2 part series. Part 1 will be a pair of flat prim sandals (the sandals from the Roman outfit). Part 2 will be a pair of prim heels (actually heeled pumps).



The flat prim sandals will demonstrate all the ingredients needed to create a pair of shoes except for the heel portion. You can then add to or change the shoe design as you like, by adding covers, straps, decorations, textures, or styling. Or you can build new shoes, sneakers, or boots using this as a guide.

First a quick overview. Shoes are avatar attachments, same as prim hair, prim skirts, or prim jewelry. They attach to your Right and Left Foot Attachment points. If you rezzed a block and attached it to your Right Foot, you would effectively have a shoe. Not a pretty one, but its a shoe. Making it look decent is the goal of this tutorial.

There are 2 major components to a pair of prim shoes: the SL Shoe and the Prim Shoe.

The SL Shoe (which is created and modified in the "Appearance..." screen) sets the size of your feet, the heel height, and the platform height for a platform shoe. The SL Shoe basically adjusts your avatar's feet to warp it into a shoe-like thing. You can apply a texture to your warped feet to make it look like a pair of sneakers or cowboy boots. But the resulting shoe will have a painted-on look (like clothing).



Here is a sample pair of SL shoes.

Because we are making prim shoes, we will only use the SL Shoe to adjust the size of your feet, set the heel height, and the platform height. We will apply a Fully Transparent texture to the SL Shoe, because we want to see a bare foot in the Prim Shoe.

The Prim Shoe is a linked set of prims that looks like a shoe. It could be a sneaker, or a boot, or a sandal, or a heel. It could be fancy, with jeweled decorations, real archs, and lining. Or it could be a simple flat base with a strap on top. You are only limited by your imagination and what you can do with prims.



Here is a sample pair of prim heels. I think you'll agree that it looks MUCH better than the SL Shoe! :)

So lets start building the prim sandals.

You will need a Full Transparent texture (with a black Alpha Channel) to make this shoe. You can pick up this texture for free at the Sirena Hair store (in the Freebie section). You can go through the steps without the texture, but it would look like you are wearing a white sock until you apply the texture.

Go somewhere that you can create things in, like a Sandbox, for instance.

1. Creating the SL Shoe

We need to prepare your avatar's feet to receive the prim shoes. This is done via the Appearance... screen.

First, detach and take off any SL or prim shoes you are wearing.



Right-click on yourself, and select "Appearance..." from the menu. Select the "Shoes" tab. Press the "Create New Shoes" button (if you dont see this button, press the "Take Off" button first). Enter the following settings:

     Shoe Height: 0
     Heel Height: 0
     Heel Shape: 100
     Toe Shape: 50
     Toe Thickness: 0
     Platform Height: 0
     Platform Width: 42

Next, click in the square box above "Fabric". This will bring up the "Pick:Texture" window. Select the Full Transparent texture (either one from your own Inventory or from the Sirena Hair store).

When you are all done, press the "Save All" button and the "Close" button. You should have a new pair of SL Shoes named "New Shoes" in the Clothing folder of your Inventory. Go ahead and rename these shoes to something like "Roman Sandal Base".

2. Creating the Prim Shoe (Sandal)

OK here comes the fun part. We are going to build the prim shoe/sandal. And we are going to build it BIG first (at 10x the final size), then shrink it later. This makes it much easier to work on.

The prim sandal is made up of 7 prims. In addition, we are going to make a sizing board to make it easier to fit the shoe together and resize.

Ready?

Rez a prim on the ground. Press Shift-X. This moves the prim to the nearest 0.25M point. This helps us line stuff up later.

Go to the General tab, and change the Name to "1". Go to the Object tab. Change the Building Block Type to "Cylinder". Enter the following settings:

     Size (meters) X: 1.090
     Size (meters) Y: 1.440
     Size (meters) Z: 0.210

Go to the Texture tab. Click on the square above "Color". This will open the Color Picker. Select a color for the sandal. The Roman sandal uses this color formula (but you can use any color you like):

     Red: 76
     Green: 57
     Blue: 38

Note that the Color Picker has a bug when entering numbers by hand. When you enter the last number for Blue, just click on the Green box before clicking the "Select" button. Dont ask me why, but this works.

Prim "1" will be the front tip of the sandal. We are going to clone it to make all the other prims.

So make sure Prim "1" is selected in Edit more, and you can see the Red/Green/Blue movement arrows. Press and hold the Shift key, then click on the Green arrow and pull it to the right. This will make a copy of Prim "1" perfectly lined up to the right.



Do this 6 more times until you have a total of 8 prims.

Starting from the left, Edit each prim and change the Name to a number from 1 to 8. The one on the extreme left should be "1". The one on the extreme right should be "8". This will helps us reference the prims below.

OK, now Edit Prim "2".

Change the Building Block Type to "Box". Enter the following settings:

     Size (meters) X: 1.090
     Size (meters) Y: 0.210
     Size (meters) Z: 1.500

     Rotation (degrees) X: 270.00

     Taper X: 0.15

Edit Prim "3".

Leave the Building Block Type as "Cylinder". Enter the following settings:

     Size (meters) X: 0.930
     Size (meters) Y: 0.540
     Size (meters) Z: 0.210

Edit Prim "4".

Change the Building Block Type to "Torus". Enter the following settings:

     Size (meters) X: 1.250
     Size (meters) Y: 0.980
     Size (meters) Z: 1.020

     Rotation (degrees) Z: 90.00

     Path Cut End: 0.500
     Skew: -0.75 (Note: this is a negative value!!)
     Hole Size X: 0.60
     Hole Size Y: 0.05

Edit Prim "5".

Change the Building Block Type to "Torus". Enter the following settings:

     Size (meters) X: 1.250
     Size (meters) Y: 0.980
     Size (meters) Z: 1.020

     Rotation (degrees) Z: 90.00

     Path Cut End: 0.500
     Skew: 0.75
     Hole Size X: 0.60
     Hole Size Y: 0.05

Edit Prim "6".

Change the Building Block Type to "Torus". Enter the following settings:

     Size (meters) X: 1.250
     Size (meters) Y: 1.030
     Size (meters) Z: 1.120

     Rotation (degrees) Z: 90.00

     Path Cut End: 0.500
     Skew: -0.75 (Note: this is a negative value!!)
     Hole Size X: 0.60
     Hole Size Y: 0.05

Edit Prim "7".

Change the Building Block Type to "Torus". Enter the following settings:

     Size (meters) X: 1.250
     Size (meters) Y: 1.030
     Size (meters) Z: 1.120

     Rotation (degrees) Z: 90.00

     Path Cut End: 0.500
     Skew: 0.75
     Hole Size X: 0.60
     Hole Size Y: 0.05

Edit Prim "8". (OK last one :D!)

Change the Building Block Type to "Box". Enter the following settings:

     Size (meters) X: 1.090
     Size (meters) Y: 2.500
     Size (meters) Z: 0.100

Go to the Texture tab of Prim "8". Click on the square above "Color" to open the Color Picker. Click on the bright Red square on the bottom row and press the Select button.



When you are all done, you should now have a line of prims that look something like this (and everyone should be looking at you funny in the Sandbox :P).

3. Assembling the Prim Sandal

We are now going to put all these prims together!

The red Prim "8" is our sizing board. The finished sandal should be the same width and length as this board.



So Edit the red Prim "8". Use the green and blue arrows and move Prim "8" under Prim "1" until the left edges are lined up.

Next, move Prim "2" left into Prim "1". There is a point when the left side of Prim "2" will disappear into Prim "1". Dont go too far, or Prim "2" will stick out again.

Move Prim "3" left into Prim "2". Make sure that the right edge of Prim "3" lines up with the right edge of the red Prim "8".



Now adjust Prim "2" as needed until the bottom of the shoe looks OK. Dont worry about being too exact! You can always adjust later as well.

Next, we are going to move the straps in place.

Move Prim "4" as far to the left as you can without having the buried parts of the strap stick out of the bottom. You might want to use the Red arrow to move Prim "4" forward a little bit; this would enable you to slide Prim "4" a little bit more to the left.



Do the same for Prim "5". They should make an "X" along the middle of the sandal.

Now bring Prim "6" and Prim "7" along and do the same thing you just did. Again, dont worry, this is not an exact science!



Your sandal should be looking like the finished product!

4. Linking and Shrinking

Now we need to link all these prims together and shrink it.

First, lets talk about linked prims. As you noticed above, each of the 8 prims you created can be moved separately. We need a way to group them all together so they behave as one. In SL, this is called linking.

When you link a group of prims, one of them becomes the main prim of the group, called the Root Prim. The Root Prim is special, because position and rotation is done relative to the Root Prim. When you select prims to be linked, the last prim to be selected becomes the Root Prim.

In the case of the sandal, we want the Root Prim to be 1 of the 3 bottom pieces of the sandal (preferably Prim "2", the middle one). We dont want the Root Prim to be one of the straps, because it would be difficult to fit the shoe using one of the straps as reference.

Note that we are going to link in the red Prim "8" sizing board as well. We will unlink Prim "8" after resizing.

So let's link the sandal.

Make sure you can see the whole sandal and the sizing board. Right-click on any prim and select Edit.



Click and hold outside the sandal, and drag the yellow window around the entire sandal and sizing board. The entire sandal and the sizing board should be outlined in yellow.

Now press and hold the Shift key. Left-click on Prim "2" to de-select it. Left-click on Prim "2" again to select it. This makes Prim "2" the last prim to be selected, thus will make it the Root Prim when we link.

To link the prims, click on Tools at the top of your screen, and select Link. You will notice that all the prims are now outlined in blue, except Prim "2" is outlined in yellow.

Next, we are going to shrink the sandal to its final size.

First, bring the shoe at least 1M off the ground. There have been reports of shoes disappearing into the ground when they are being shrunk, so better be on the safe side :)

Then Edit the sandal. Click on the "Stretch (Ctrl-Shift)" button at the top of the Edit window. There should be some white handles around the sandal. Grab one, and push it in towards the sandal until you cant shrink it any more. For your reference, the display at the top of your screen should read: "X:0.109 Y:0.112 Z:0.275".

Lastly, we are going to unlink the sizing board.

Edit the sandal. Click on the "Edit linked parts" checkbox. Now click on the sizing board, so only the sizing board is selected. Click on Tools at the top of your screen, and select Unlink. That's it! The sizing board has now been removed from the sandal.

One last thing: we want to name the sandal.

Edit the sandal. Click on the General tab. And change the Name to "Roman Sandal (L)".

Congratulations! You have just made your first prim shoe! :)

Close your Edit window to get out of edit mode. Right-click on the sandal and select "Take" to take the sandal into your Inventory.

5. Fitting the Sandal

Now that the sandal is ready, we need to attach it to our avatar. Lets start with the left foot, then clone the shoe for the right foot.

You should be familiar with prim fitting techniques. If you need a refresher, check out the entry on creating and fitting Single Prim Attachments. Fitting a Multi Prim Attachment (like the sandal) uses the same techniques.

To fit the sandal, Right-click on the "Roman Sandal (L)" in your Inventory, select "Attach To >", and click on "Left Foot".



The sandal will initially attach with the wrong orientation. You need to rotation the sandal until the straps are in front.

Go ahead and Edit the sandals while they are on your foot. You can do this by hand, by pressing and holding the Ctrl key and turning the color wheels (this is how I did it initially).

Or you can cheat and enter these values :P

     Rotation (degrees) Y: 270.00
     Rotation (degrees) Z: 90.00

Next, drag the Red/Green/Blue arrows until the sandal fits well on your feet. If you use the numbers at the top as a reference, this is a good position: "X:-0.050 Y:0.000 Z:-0.012". Dont worry if you cant get an exact match (for example, Z may get stuck at -0.011 and -0.013). Just pick one and move on.

When you are done positioning, Right-click on the sandal and select "Detach".

In your Inventory screen, Right-click on the "Roman Sandal (L)" and select Copy. Then Right-click again on the "Roman Sandal (L)" and select Paste. There should now be 2 copies of the sandal.

Right-click on one copy, select Rename, and change the name to "Roman Sandal (R)". Now Right-click on "Roman Sandal (R)", select "Attach To >", and click on "Right Foot".

Go ahead and repeat the steps above for rotating the shoe. You should not have to change the position.

Just one final note: after you do any fitting with a prim attachment, be sure that you detach the prim after you are done to "save" the settings.

So go ahead and right click on "Roman Sandal (R)" and select Detach.

That's it! You have now created a pair of shoes from scratch and fitted it. Feel free to jazz it up with different colors, textures, bling scripts, and add additional prim decorations!

In Part 2 of this series next week, we are going to make a pair of prim heels! :)

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