I have done this before come to remember. I have seen some amazing plywood renders where they have used textures though.
Endgrain textures aren’t the hard part - it’s being able to get a good UV mapping especially for something that’s can’t be roughed in with a cubic map.
Hard when you’re working in Keyshot or most typical ID tools unless you export to an interim tool like Blender/Maya/Max to do the UV unwrapping.
This video seems to have a good overview of the process for Blender (which is free) if anyone wants to get fancy:
These are some renderings we recently delivered for a tradeshow booth and accompanying custom Chevy step van.
goofing around with some old CAD that had all of the components in it.
I wish it was work for Herman Miller! It’s a personal project I started in 2016 for a presentation I gave at SOLIDWORKS World. I’ve since gone on to disassemble and reverse engineer all of the Eames pieces I’ve collected over the years. The fiberglass shell chair is probably the most accurate recreation, I had the shell 3D scanned and matched it within 0.01". Everything else is best guesses with a tape measure, calipers and photographs.
For the leather creases, they’re modeled in SW. I model the rough shape of the pillow, trim an outline for the tufting, then model a new surface passing through a crazy 3D spline that creates the creases. The screenshot explains it much better.
The fiberglass texture was created with the Keyshot material graph from a texture I found online. I can use the same material for the different colors, it’s just a matter of tweaking some of the nodes.
Im - old so i feel like i need to justify the “date” the rendering was done as software was a little more “manual” 20years ago…
Gonna start with my housewares work and then .
This was done early 2000/2001 The unit in the case is the prototype and the one with the shoes is one of the renderings - everything is CG but the shoes. 4 render passes created - Alias Studio with photoshop
Nice renders! Love the method for getting the leather creasing, I’ll have to try that one sometime. Is the 3d sketch controlled in any way, or floating where it looks right?
I’m liking the mint version, the finish makes it looks like it would feel nice 
I’ve been spending a lot of time building a computational design portfolio. Here’s my latest render. A NASA inspired snow boot. As a kid, I always thought snow boots were the closest thing to astronaut boots!
Also, I added some noise on there like the kids do these days. 
Nice render Lois. Rendering shoes in 3D is not the easiest and you really captured the “shoeness” rather nicely.
I saw on instagram how you used computational design but I’m not really sure if this is a good example of the tool. What benefit does it have other than making my shoe look a bit like a puffy brain? It seems like just styling, which is totally fine in my book to do a fun NASA themed space boot for kid, but I don’t think computational design is a good path to get there. I’m not seeing anything that couldn’t have been done traditionally rather quickly. Meanwhile the D rings look a bit undesigned and I’m not exactly sure the manufacturing process on the upper and tooling. Would the velcro straps really just be straight cuts like that or would they be radiuses and finished somehow?
What are some other applications that could show off the potential of this tool in a more meaningful way?
Thanks Michael. You’re right, getting shoes to feel like shoes is a bit of a struggle, the materials are hard to match, the shape is also tricky. I don’t really see the day photography gets kicked out in that field.
Very fair criticisms though. It might have been a bit of a case of “when a hammer is your tool everything starts to look like a nail” on my part. The underdesigned parts were purposely to stay on theme though a bit more exploration might have landed better solutions.
You do bring up a good point, in the context of portfolio work to focus on pieces where the technology brings much more tangible value.
I did wrap up a project last week that was much less whimsical and much more practical. I designed a plastic midsole insert which pulls on your laces at every step. I engineered/optimized the part in such a way that the plastic part matches the foot feel of an EVA midsole and the tension applied on the laces stays in a comfort zone. I’m hoping to have a portfolio page done soon. In the mean time I do have a short video on my Instagram from a few days ago that goes over some of the details.
