Ethno Footwear Drop
Tools: Substance Painter, Substance Designer, Substance Sampler, Substance Stager, Photoshop
The project explores Slavic folk craft translated into a contemporary high-top sneaker, with a focus on material storytelling and procedural surfacing. The design draws from traditional embroidery, geometric ornament, floral motifs, woven textiles, and natural straw craftsmanship while adapting those references to a modern footwear silhouette.
The reference phase focused on traditional Slavic embroidery, woven textiles, ornamental patterns, and natural fiber craftsmanship. Examples of folk garments, cross-stitch motifs, floral embroidery, geometric borders, and straw weaving were collected to study their construction, repetition, color relationships, surface qualities, and subtle handmade imperfections.
Procedural Folk Textile Pattern
Tool: Substance DesignerBuilt a procedural textile material based on traditional Slavic geometric ornament. The graph generates repeating motifs with control over pattern scale, spacing, color variation, height, and roughness. Pattern construction and material properties were developed in separate branches, allowing the surface and visual design to be adjusted independently.
Procedural Woven Straw
Tool: Substance Designer Created a procedural woven-fiber material for the heel panels, based on the interlaced structure of natural straw. The graph builds the strand placement and overlap while introducing height, roughness, and color variation to break up uniformity. Height and normal information reinforce the layered structure of the weave and help the material remain readable at footwear scale.
Embroidery
Tool: Substance 3D SamplerIn Substance 3D Sampler, image-based ornamental references were converted into dimensional embroidery materials, where thread density, direction, thickness, fill behavior, height, and color separation were adjusted to produce a more convincing stitched surface. Multiple embroidery variations were generated from the same workflow, including floral and wheat motifs, allowing the thread structure to remain consistent while the graphic design and palette changed across the asset.
The materials were assembled in Substance 3D Painter using layered masking and channel-specific adjustments, with particular attention to micro-surface variation, roughness contrast, stitching definition, edge transitions, and the relationship between height and normal information. Three colorways were developed while preserving the same underlying material structure, using parameter and color adjustments to explore how the procedural patterns and embroidery translated across different palettes without rebuilding the surfacing from scratch.
