Select Upper, Paint its region, then Grow the upper.
With Paint lit, a drag on the piece paints and a drag beside it turns the view; Orbit only turns it.
A parametric shoe-last designer. A last is the mold a shoe is built around. Everything grades from a real foot length with published lastmaking math.
EU, UK, US or Mondopoint, converted through foot length (ISO 19407). Fitting is the width: eleven steps of 3/16 inch of ball girth.
Last length is the foot plus the toe allowance: 15mm for a standard shoe, none for a sandal.
Warp bends a reference last. NURBS lofts through a CAD last’s girth stations. Blocks fuses six masses from the chart. All three grade from the same chart.
Last Type sets heel, toe spring, toe shape, vamp and allowance together. Personality overlays it; Foot Morphology nudges width and toe box. Shape overrides one value; a pencil mark shows it, Reset returns it.
Side (the lateral side), Plan, Back, Front, 3/4 and Fit. They are perspective; measure with the Measure tool, not a screenshot.
Ball girth is the fitting dimension. Solve to the charted ball girth (on by default) changes the forepart’s depth only; length, ball width and height hold. With it on, the Ball Girth slider is the target. Off, the mesh runs over the chart.
The last’s maximum outline from below, SVG at 1:1 with a 50mm check bar. Not the feather edge. The dashed line is the ball, where the mesh is widest.
The side flattened: inside, outside and mean forme, SVG at 1:1. The drawing states the stretch left in it.
Cutting die (DXF, 1:1) writes the mean forme as AutoCAD R12 DXF in millimeters: the cut line, an 8 mm seam allowance, alignment notches, a grainline, and a verdict on how far a TPU skin stretches over it.
An STL or OBJ last, oriented from its geometry, measured with the same instruments as yours. A reference only: in no export and no saved file.
A second last in yellow over yours: another size, another type, the girth solve on or off, or an import. Not part of the document; Measure ignores it.
The name at the top right is the document: . It autosaves in this browser as you work; a purple dot means changes since its last save to a file. New shoe and Open never lose anything: the document you leave waits in Recent, with a picture. Save (⌘S) writes the .lastfirst file, back to the same file where the browser allows it; Save as (⇧⌘S) picks a new one. Rename it at the top of the menu.
In Export (shoe mode): reads Zellerfeld’s mandatory rules on this shoe (one body, watertight, no crossing faces, a collar that splits inside from outside, overhangs at their 120° print tilt, sole height, the upper’s wall). Load their last (your own download of their template) and Fit is checked too: the shoe is carried from this last onto theirs, its inside within 0.5 mm. Submission files writes both feet’s shoe and collar STLs; their last stays in this tab.
Run OBJ writes the graded set as one file, one group per size. Spec CSV lists charted and measured girth per size.
Shoe size run (Output, in shoe mode) grades the whole shoe: each size regrades the last and regrows every piece from the same paint, then writes or into one zip with a spec CSV. The shoe is left as it was.
Idioshoe design built in pieces on the last, foot to floor: , , , and . The top row tracks pieces, followed by , , and . Selecting a grown piece displays its dials in the right HUD.
Upper: fitted to the last with slip-on, clog, or mule forms: , , . Adjust , , , , and . The toe: or ; an open back takes a . cut the upper into straps. punch round holes through it, a field or a brogue row in from the rim; the pitch is held where the piece’s mesh cannot cut closer. The holes go into STL, OBJ and 3MF, and the print. A SuperB (.unreason, .3dm) is the unpunched piece, with each hole beside it on a perforations layer: a circle in Unreason, a cylinder through the wall in Rhino (ToNURBS the SubD, then BooleanDifference). The way-in test sweeps the entry path to verify foot insertion before printing.
Midsole: a Terrainer hung under the foot down to the ground. Set , , , , , , , and . Body options include with , , and . Terrain sculptures include (stalactites), (rounded tips), , and (Three, Five, Summits). Draw plan outlines with .
Outsole: unified plate under contact pads and stalactite tips: , , and (twelve patterns as swatches, Carved or Raised, a Round, V or Square groove section; picking a pattern sets the suggested section and says why; Where lays it only on a painted Color, Edge curve shapes the soft edge, and a Border cuts a band round the rim. Flex grooves cross the ball line at a pitch from their width, depth and the Bend at which they close), and (Fuzzy sides: the slicer’s fuzzy skin on the outsole’s outer walls).
The terrain places are real heightfields. A place wraps once round the sole, seam at the heel; the readout gives its scale as N× life. Terrain data: AWS Terrain Tiles (Tilezen/Mapzen terrarium) — Europe terrain data produced using Copernicus data and information funded by the European Union, EU-DEM layers; United States 3DEP (formerly NED) and global GMTED2010 and SRTM terrain data courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey; Canada terrain data contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada; New Zealand terrain data Copyright 2011 Crown copyright (c) Land Information New Zealand; Australia terrain data © Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia) 2017; Global ETOPO1 terrain data U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Layers: stack Shell, Puff, Terrainer, or Pipe forms on substrates: , , and . Pipe elements include continuous tube, spaced beads, grommet eyelets, zipper teeth, and crisscross laces.
Print & Slicer: prepare production prints with , , , , and . The estimate notes an open piece and a stack past the box.
Tools & Views: sculpt directly with rail tools , , , , , and . Inspect with , , , , , and .
The Line puts points on the painted edge. Drag one, press the line twice to add one, , or the whole edge.
Freehand brushes, stored as a delta that survives size and preset changes, one per generator. Off while subdivision is on.
Subdivision and smoothing run after sculpt and never alter the document. Both pull the surface in slightly.
Measure is a caliper; Wrap follows the surface along mesh edges. The measured girth line reads the mesh at its widest section.
The last, any shoe piece, or the whole shoe, as 3MF, OBJ, STL, 1:1 SVG patterns, and .
By Phil Renato, written with Claude (Anthropic). · or press the wordmark.
MIT License. LICENSE · DISCLAIMER · renato.design
the mold they pulled before the shoe existed
A shoe-last and shoe designer: a last graded from a real foot length, the shoe’s pieces grown on it, and files to print or to model further.
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Research software, not a commercial product: read the disclaimer before relying on anything it makes.