Polygon Shoe Rendering

Created some greyscale versions of the shoe texture to use as bump maps,  lightened them quite a bit as the bump map was far to strong on the shoe when I applied it, so these lighter ones create a more subtle effect which looked a bit more realistic:

Shoe without bump map:

Shoe with bump map applied:

Setting up the scene to render:

Set up a 3 point lighting for the shoe object, a spotlight at the front, an area light at the side to light up an area which was too dark, and a directional light which casts raytraced shadows. I also set up a camera and added in a polygon plane for the shoe to sit on.

The shadow being cast by the directional light looked too harsh with the hard edges

Feathered the edges by increasing the Shadow Rays and Light Angle

Setting up the render passes in the Master Layer to include: Beauty, Depth, Diffuse, Shadow and a DiffuseNoShadow to experiment with. I did not add in a Specular pass as there is no specular map applied to the shoe. Also set up an Ambient Occlusion render layer by itself as the pass I set up in the master layer didn't work

Ambient Occlusion set up by creating a surface shader and attaching a mib_amb_occlusion to it

For assessment we needed a pair of something, so for the shoe I duplicated and mirrored the object to create another one. I then adjusted some of the geometry according to the position I put it in, for example the loops of the laces are now falling gravity to the floor:

Pair of shoes - Ambient Occlusion