A Vectorworks Mashup: 45 minute Shoe Design

When I saw the Core77 invitation for the one-hour design contest for bicycle shoes, I immediately thought of a "classic American" design that I'd been thinking would make a great "townie" cycling shoe, the Converse Chuck Taylor All Star (CTAS). We are alwasys talking about Vectorworks as a BIM and 3D tool, this is a very different kind of design exercise, using VW to "mash up" images and vector art.

Here's the step-by-step:

1. Custom-color some Chucks: I logged on to the Converse website and went to their custom shoe design section for CTAS. I thought yellow and blue Chucks would be nice for my bike, so I colored 'em up...

2. Print the Chucks to PDF and Edit: Using the Print command from the Converse website gives you a nice, relatively clean graphic, as shown. All I wanted was the image of the shoe itself, so I used the eraser tool and the marquee tool in Graphic Converter to clean up the background graphics away from the shoe image. Then I cropped the image to just the shoe and saved as a PNG.

3. Import to Vectorworks and enhance with vector art: Using the "Import Image File" command, I brought the shoe image into Vectorworks. I used the Polyline tool to outline the sole in perspective, duplicated it (for the insole to be used later), then drew a line down the shoe axis and split the polyline, so I could dash the back half.

4. Google for an image of a carbon-fiber and import to image fill: I Googled for "image carbon fiber mesh" and found a website for a company called "Fiberglast". They had an image I liked for the carbon fiber sole. I imported it and made it an image fill, then applied it with rotation to the "exploded insole" part of the drawing. I drew a couple of white-fill polys to represent the slots for the cleat.

5. Google for an image of a cleat and import: I Googled for "spd cleat image" and quickly found an image of a cleat that I could import. I brought the image into Vectorworks, scaled it and rotated it to look right with the perspective of the shoe image. I also drew a little polyline "shadow" to give it some depth.

7. Annotate: Using the Vectorworks callout tool, I added some notes. I used a backing "white out" arrow with a heavy line-weight for each callout to separate them from the image beneath:

8. Export to PNG and upload to Core77's website.