Cinderella's Glass Sneakers

[Tyger2]

This is my project for this week’s Blender Collab Challenge: “Will you go to the ball?”.
(Check it out, and join in if you want!)

I’m playing on

1. the double meaning of “ball”

2. sports metaphors, e.g.:

• “The Big Dance” = the NCAA basketball tournament
• “Cinderella story” = an underdog team comes out of nowhere and surprisingly does very well
• “The Last Dance” = The title of recent Michael Jordan documentary

3. and also just my opinion that playing sports (basketball in particular) feels like dancing

Here’s my concept drawing:

Initial scene block-out:

I’ll be basing the shoes on the class Air Jordan 1 basketball shoe, which still look cool, even though they came out in 1985!

Then I’m going to try to give them a glass material like Cinderella’s slippers in the story. That’s the plan anyway. I’ll post my progress here and we’ll see how it goes!

[Miss_B]

This is going to be interesting.

[Tyger2]

@Miss_B Thanks! Hopefully I can pull it off.

Here’s how it’s looking so far.

Found a nice parquet wood floor texture from Textures.com. I need to play with the node settings more to make it look better, but it’s OK for now.

Added a leather texture to the ball. It looks OK from some angles, but atrocious around the edges. Just had a thought… Maybe I should make it look a little like a pumpkin to fit the story more. Let me know if you guys have any ideas about that.

Then I got the basic shape of the shoes. They’re going to be the difficult part, as they’re more complicated than I thought.

[Tyger2]

Working on the shoes today. First, added a subdivision modifier and adjusted the mesh to fit the shape in the reference images. It ended up like this:

So far so good. But I was a bit stuck as to how I was going to do all the different panels of the shoe as seen in the reference:

So I decided to just make them separate objects, and maybe bool them together later (or maybe not!) Each separate panel is kind of it’s own island, and I used face snapping to help them stick roughly to the surface of the shoe. Then I added a solidify modifier to give them some depth.

And Here’s how it looks with some basic colored materials:

Of course, it’s going to have some glass materials later, but these colors match the reference, so they help me visualize it and see if it looks how it should.

[Alexandra_Ispas]

Wow you make it seem so simple and the outcome looks so good. I’m curious what a glass version would look like. How can you simulate glass anyway? I’ve got my own shoes for the challenge in the making, and right now I’m not sure how I’ll get around the colour issue, so I’m super interested to know.

[Tyger2]

Hey thanks! It’s all from things I learned in the course, mostly.

Here’s how I do the glass:

Glass Recipe

In the Render Tab, make sure “Screen Space Reflections” and “Refraction” are enabled. (I don’t remember if “Ambient Occlusion” is necessary or not, but I always have it on anyway).

Then in your material (you can use the default “Principled BSDF” material) , set Transmission = 1, and play with the IOR and roughness to get them how you want. Can also play with the base color to get the tint you want.

also scroll down a bit and make sure you enable “Screen Space Refraction” in your material’s settings

That’s it! It’ll give you a nice reflecting/refracting glass like I used in my chemistry set for the “Laboratory” challenge.

I got this from the Blender Guru Donut Tutorial series, particularly this episode if you want more info.

There are other methods I’ve seen using alpha transparency, which give a good cartoony glass look, but this is the one I mostly use.

[Alexandra_Ispas]

Wow the outcome looks amazing!! Thank you so much for the quick tutorial, I really appreciate it. I also can’t wait to see your final render for the challenge. I’m sure it’s gonna be really cool

[Ethan_Martinez]

Thanks for the tutorial Tyger!

Really nice material that I will definitely be using in the future!

[Tyger2]

@Alexandra_Ispas @Ethan_Martinez Happy to pass along what I can! That whole Blender Guru donut tutorial is pretty good. I’d recommend it.

Here’s how Cinderella’s footwear is coming along:

I gave the light blue tinted glass a bit of emission, because the glass was really dark otherwise. I was debating whether or not to add the laces, because they don’t really make sense on glass shoes, but glass basketball shoes don’t make any sense anyway! So I’ll just see what looks better.

I’d also like to give them more of a sparkle. In the old Disney Cartoon the slippers always had kind of a magic sparkle to them. Not quite sure how to do that yet.

[Leon_V]

Thanks Tyger2, I was just about to practice bezier curves and spin on some wine glasses and a bottle and the glass tutorial was just what I needed.

[Tyger2]

Finished it up over the last two days. Here are the more interesting parts of the last phase:

I added some vines to make the basketball look like a pumpkin.

I made them using Bezier curves with a bit of a bevel:

I used a Bezier circle as a taper object so that they’d get thinner at the ends. The curves were a bit tricky to work with, but I got a lot of practice. I think this way is much easier than having a mesh with the same shape.

Then I made the leaves:

You can see from the wireframes that they’re really simple meshes. I just added a slight subdivision surface mod, and tweaked their shapes a bit to give them some more life.

They’re all from this one texture from Textures.com:

Love that site. This particular texture also came with a height map, roughness map, normal map, even a translucency map (which I didn’t use, because I don’t know how yet).

But the important one is the alpha map:

Just plug the color from that into the alpha on your material and you’re set! I was surprised how good it looked right away.

So I made one simple leaf plane, then just duplicated it and adjusted the UV maps to make it look like different leaves.

Finally, I added some magic sparkles to the shoes:

They’re particles set to emit an icosphere with an emission shader. Then to give them that nice glowing effect, I added a “glare” filter in the compositor, set to “fog glow”.

Check out the finished product at the weekly challenge page.

So that’s it! I had a lot of fun making it. If I were to continue this project, I might add a mouse somewhere around the shoes, maybe some basketball hoops in the background, or other environment stuff.

What do you guys think?

[dmfrodol]

Had never tried something like this with curves. Now I had to do smth similar in style!

[Tyger2]

They’re fun! But they take a little getting used to. Sometimes manipulating the handles can be a bit tricky.

[Tyger2]

Thanks! This is one of my favorite ones that I made. I don’t remember exactly how much time it took, but I think I spent the better part of my free time for a week on it.

[ChrisSGCP]

Looks amazing!