Does anyone have a method for creating herringbone patterns and making them more realistic? I can figure out just about every other part of the shoe, but my soles always look flat and lifeless.
I’m no shoe wiz, but I’d start by adding some bevel and emboss layer effects to your wiggly line layer. It might work better on your red layer though, as long as there’s gaps where the wiggles are.
First off, the outer shape of that outsole is very bloated looking. Way too fat. Then I’d work the design of the outsole itself. If the design is hit, it shouldn’t matter what herringbone repeat is in there. The herringbone is not going to bring it to life on its own. Then, once your to the herringbone, render it like you would render anything else with ups and downs with a directional light.
Bellow is one of mine, it had a very large herringbone as a trial at first.
i have done the very traditional herringbone basketball tread that you are going for. and yes i think yo has a good point in basically saying to render how it really is with shape form and light, study a real shoe and recreate the details, its really no different than how you render any other part of a shoe in that sense.
But i would take your zigzag paths and use a darker brush for the deep areas then put a slight blur on it, then use a really thin dark brush to represent the bottom of the valley.
Do the same to create the peaks, except it will be a lighter brush. This will help create the up and down effect, may still require some tweaks after that though.
buy yes do not go any further on this outsole rendering until you correct the proportions, right now it looks like the bottom of a crocs shoe. 
Also why do you have large white highlight areas in your color dam? it should be darker in there not white hot spots.
yo, did you create that background grid in illustrator flat, then warp the lines, or did you carefully make the paths in correct perspective?
I made the outer, bent “L” tool, then used the scale tool, to scale it horizontally as a copy a few degrees at a time until it made a nearly straight line. Spaced them evenly using the distribute tool, then reflected the other side of the grid. Took about 45 seconds. Rendering took maybe 30 minutes. It is not a great render, just a quick indication of an idea.
o i c… i think 
your right, the rendering does not look like a “real shoe” but it was quick and pretty much all the information needed to make a blueprint from is there, so anything more is not really necessary, visually.
Obviously you would have all the tech details (radiuses, offsets, textures, etc).
I have been doing most of my outsole renderings more this way as well, getting them done in under an hour, depending on complexity.
For patterns like this, layer styles work really well. There are two ways to do it in this pdf and source file. This is a partial , simplified example but hopefully you get the idea from it.
PDF series of screen caps
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14369/screens.pdf
source file
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14369/shoepattern.psd
EDIT: WTF, why does the forum change “t-i-n-y-u-r-l” to “knitting-channel” ?
Thanks a lot everyone, rendering soles is definitely a weakness of mine, but that just means I gotta put in more practice right?
Yo, thanks for pointing out the wonky proportions, that’s what I get for staring at the screen all day and not taking a step back to look at the overall images. I’ll definitely throw down an underlay and fix my proportions.
Thanks to dziner82 and bennybtl for the tips, will most definitely take another try (or ten) at this.