Footwear design & visuAlization
Nike x Tom Sachs Boot: Procedural Deconstruction
How does a collaboration built around craft transparency translate into a 3D workflow?
This project used the Nike x Tom Sachs boot as source material, a fitting subject given Sachs' ethos of exposing how things are made. Using Houdini, Blender, and generative AI, I procedurally deconstructed the shoe into its component layers, isolating the upper, midsole, and outsole as discrete elements. The goal was threefold: explore procedural workflows, test generative AI as a design accelerant, and produce production-quality visualization.
The deconstruction sequence reflects how I think about footwear: as a construction problem first, aesthetic second. That instinct is grounded in earlier work in physical product development, including factory visits in China evaluating prototypes.
Nike Air Max 90: Topographic Displacement
What happens when performance data becomes surface texture?
I applied a topographic displacement system to the Air Max 90, treating the shoe's surface as terrain rather than fabric. The material is fully custom: displacement, color gradients, and surface variation were all built from scratch rather than sourced. This was an exploration of how far a recognizable silhouette can be pushed before it stops being a shoe and starts being something else.
Nike ACG: Procedural Fiber Simulation
Can a shoe's textile construction be made visible as a design element?
This project used a Nike ACG trail model as the base and applied a procedurally generated fiber system to the upper, simulating the textile structure of the material as an exposed, living surface rather than something hidden beneath a clean finish. The fibers were built through procedural workflows in Houdini, not sculpted or painted. The result sits somewhere between a construction diagram and a creature, which was exactly the point. It's a question about what footwear looks like when the way it's made becomes the aesthetic.
Nike LeBron 15: Material Exploration
How does a performance basketball shoe respond to materials that have no business being on a basketball shoe?
Starting from an AI-generated base mesh, this project was about applying the same topographic displacement language developed in earlier work to a high-top performance silhouette. The wireframe stage shows the geometry before any material is applied, which was important: the underlying form had to be solid before the surface treatment could work at this scale. The LeBron 15's aggressive paneling and volume made it a more demanding subject than a low-top, and a more interesting one.
Puffer Concept
What does a sneaker look like if it's designed from a trash bag?
This is an original concept with no existing silhouette as reference. The inspiration was mundane: the visual language of a garbage bag: glossy, inflated, slightly grotesque - transplanted into a footwear context. The material was built custom in Blender, developed through the shading workflow visible in the process images, and pushed toward something that reads as both familiar and deeply wrong. The avant-garde angle was intentional: not every project needs to be manufacturable. Sometimes the value is in asking what a shoe could be, not what it should be.