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The High Heel Problem

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Re: The High Heel Problem

#21

Post by swiftcoder »

defrost wrote: post #18
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #16

Wait, what modern material enabled stilettos? Acrylics? Vinyl? I want to say steel, but I din’t think that is right.

The physical world stiletto shoe challenge rests on the engineering of the "shank and heel" piece, the actual heel and the weight supporting shank that arcs under the foot between the in and outsole. These can be steel, titanium, thick plastic, etc. The integrity and trustworthiness of the stiletto relies on these often very thin pieces staying undeformed and rigid wrt each other despite human mass scale forces bendi…

The other (often neglected) challenge is having flooring materials that stand up to a few million pascals of pressure concentrated under that tiny heel. They'll often punch holes right through pre-war parquet flooring, or the bottom of a small wooden boat - yachtsman watch for stilettos like hawks

Re: The High Heel Problem

#23

Post by pjc50 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #16

Wait, what modern material enabled stilettos? Acrylics? Vinyl? I want to say steel, but I din’t think that is right.

Meanwhile I'll note that raised heels were originally menswear - derived from riding boots, where the heel keeps the stirrup in place, but gradually got taller for conspicuous display, then disappeared along with most of the rest of peacocking.

Re: The High Heel Problem

#24

Post by KronisLV »

voidUpdate wrote: post #22

Things like this are why I'm glad I'm not a Game Character Artist. I'd just give everyone trainers and be done with it haha

As someone who writes code for a living, I've also helped people ship a few games (freelancing).

But trying to make my own 3D game from scratch is more often than not in a standstill, because doing the art is difficult and so is getting good at it.

Even something as simple as wanting to scale down my country's geography into 7x4 km chunked terrain presents problems - while the geological features are there, even with work on making the finer details look more realistic, I'd still need to make rivers that flow realistically from higher altitude above sea level down to it and then merge with the sea, which is easier said than done.

Don't even get me started on the idea of modelling, rigging and animating characters with complex finite state machines and whatnot.

Of course, a part of it is probably just managing scope and expectations (this project might take a decade without going full time to release something mediocre, even if learning a lot in the process), but it's pretty cool just how many details there are to the craft.

Re: The High Heel Problem

#25

Post by voidUpdate »

KronisLV wrote: post #24
voidUpdate wrote: post #22

Things like this are why I'm glad I'm not a Game Character Artist. I'd just give everyone trainers and be done with it haha

As someone who writes code for a living, I've also helped people ship a few games (freelancing). But trying to make my own 3D game from scratch is more often than not in a standstill, because doing the art is difficult and so is getting good at it. Even something as simple as wanting to scale down my country's geography into 7x4 km chunked terrain presents problems - while the geological features are there, even with…

Yeah, I've done game programming and tried to make some on my own, but I'm just bad at art in general, and I've tried to get better a few times but my mental state makes it harder for me. Generally I've just used asset packs for my unfinished projects, or made ascii art games (dwarf fortress style), but I do enjoy hard-surface modelling sometimes. Floppy creatures are just hard to rig and animate and everything though, and I really suck at 2d art (though I do enjoy shader programming)

I have thought about trying to recruit one of my more artistic friends to make a game together, but then I'm bothering a whole other person to do a project that will never see the light of day haha

Re: The High Heel Problem

#27

Post by littlestymaar »

samcheng wrote: post #12

The skeleton discussion reminded me of this real-life analysis of Vladimir Putin's high heels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY6lHjZjYXE

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy did the same.

It's quite fascinating to me that you can become so powerful while having such a lame insecurity at the same time.

Re: The High Heel Problem

#28

Post by Timpy »

I love these easy-to-illustrate examples where a request seems simple, but adds a lot of trouble for the person implementing it. "It's just adding a new skin for their footwear, how hard could that be?"

Re: The High Heel Problem

#29

Post by crazygringo »

littlestymaar wrote: post #27
samcheng wrote: post #12

The skeleton discussion reminded me of this real-life analysis of Vladimir Putin's high heels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY6lHjZjYXE

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy did the same. It's quite fascinating to me that you can become so powerful while having such a lame insecurity at the same time.

If they do it in private, then yes you might call it a lame insecurity.

If they do it only at public events where they're constantly being photographed in groups of people, it's smart image control. A leader is a symbol, and different height differences project different messages visually. That doesn't mean you need to be the tallest, but being the shortest in every photo may give voters a perception that works against you. It's not vanity; it's reality.

Actors stand on apple boxes all the time in film and TV shows, because the director wants a specific height difference between characters to arrange a shot just right, that isn't the actual actors' height difference. Not lame insecurity -- it's producing the image that communicates what you want.

Re: The High Heel Problem

#30

Post by littlestymaar »

crazygringo wrote: post #29
littlestymaar wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy did the same. It's quite fascinating to me that you can become so powerful while having such a lame insecurity at the same time.

If they do it in private, then yes you might call it a lame insecurity. If they do it only at public events where they're constantly being photographed in groups of people, it's smart image control. A leader is a symbol, and different height differences project different messages visually. That doesn't mean you need to be the tallest, but being the shortest in every photo may give voters a perception that works again…

It works for actors because the director controls the camera, but for a politician, it has the opposite effect (at least in a democracy, russian politics isn't too far from a TV show anyway).

Sarkozy was mocked all the time for being short and insecure about it, nobody ever noticed that François Hollande was small until they appeared together after Hollande's election: he was in fact smaller than Sarkozy but nobody had ever noticed that before.

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