Hey all 
I’ve been modeling a pair of converse high tops and I’ve gotten this far:
but now I’ve got to add detail on the front of the shoe and other places. I’m thinking it’s way too much detail to model, and too sharp to sculpt, should I displace?
I guess I’m just looking for direction, so any help would be greatly appreciated
for the ‘gnurled’ portion at the front, you could try using a normals texture similar to this
/uploads/default/original/4X/1/b/a/1baa03b09c20fb37b19bfa6885c08d586f08cd6c.png
Modron, thank you! Did you make that yourself or do you have a place with other resources such as that one?
It’s of my own making. I think I just made a bunch of pyramids and normals baked them to a plane.
Well thank you! For the other patterns and what not would you suggest I try a similar baking technique?
you could, and another alternative is to use a material that is set up to render as a normals map. I suspect it’s available from blendswap, or the blender foundation, but you might have to search for it. You can also make grayscale bump maps, by applying a shadeless blend texture ( gradient ) to your modelled surface, going from black to white, and rendering it. There are other ways as well, such as using mist, or using composite nodes to render the z buffer.
