14 Leather Boot Base Mesh — VOL 17

Footwear dates and places a character faster than anything above the knee. A turnshoe, a buckled riding boot, a laced work boot and a knee-high cavalry boot put four different centuries on the same body. VOL 17 is fourteen leather designs at sculpt density — the creasing across the instep, the stitched welt, the stacked heel and the way a shaft folds when it slouches are modelled rather than left to a normal map.

Inside the download

• ✓14 leather boot models as FBX and OBJ
• ✓Clean and editable topology
• ✓Polygon budgets from 65k to 1M triangles, set by the amount of sculpted detail
• ✓14 preview renders

Those numbers are deliberate. At the top of the range a boot carries a million triangles because the leather grain and the fold creases are real geometry, which is exactly what you want when the mesh is going in as bake input: project it onto your own retopologised shoe and the normal map arrives with wear that would have taken a long session in ZBrush to sculpt by hand. Nearer 65k, the boots are light enough to use directly in a cinematic or a portfolio render.

Boots also travel further than most armor parts. The same fourteen models cover fantasy, historical, western, steampunk and post-apocalyptic work with nothing more than a change of surfacing, and VOL 16 in the same series covers the plate that goes over them when a character needs both.

3ds Max, Blender, Maya and ZBrush are the listed applications, and the files are ordinary FBX and OBJ. Textures are not included — the surfaced boots in the previews show what the sculpt supports once it has been baked and painted.