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From 3D foot scans to footwear designing & production

Conference Paper · November 2014

DOI: 10.13140/2.1.3172.6404

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 6th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF TEXTILE
20 November 2014, Tirana, ALBANIA

From 3D foot scans to footwear designing & production

E. Piperi1, L. M. Galantucci2, J. Kaçani1, E. Shehi3 and T. Spahiu3

1
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Department of Production and Management in Polytechnic
University of Tirana, epiperi@fim.edu.al, Tirana

2
Dipartimento di Meccanica, Matematica e Management– Politecnico di Bari, Italy

3
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Textile and Fashion Department in Polytechnic University of
Tirana

Keywords: 3D foot scans, footwear designing, custom shoes, reverse engineering, 3D printing.

Abstract
3D scanning is a potential technology for creating individualized products. It is used in
various fields such as medicine, clothing manufacture, footwear manufacture, etc. The last
mentioned field has gained a growing interest in recent years. The foot is regarded as an
important part of human body. Footwear fit, is one of the main factors for consumer on
purchasing shoes in the daily life decisions. Designing footwear is a very complex process.
Traditional footwear design begins with a plan to sketch patterns and designs in scale drawings.
The paper sketches are done by hand, or on computer-aided software, but it can be a mix of both
technologies.
In this paper we are going to present a full cycle of footwear production, starting from 3D
foot scanning, to 3D shoes designing, 2D patterns extraction, till the production of the custom
shoes. The system, explained in these work will give the opportunity to individual clients to
produce their own shoes prototype. We are going to use the 3D printing technology to produce
custom shoes. These will help people, which have feet problems with standard shoes available
in the market creating their own shoe last. Also, it will be possible to create sample prototypes
and refining the same for both functionality and aesthetics.

1 Introduction
Footwear can be defined as a garment worn by feet. The main scope is protecting the feet
of the wearer, which is a very important part of the human being. The foot is regarded as the
second heart of the human beings in traditional Chinese medicine, transmitting and attenuating
the impact forces between the ground and the human skeletal system [1].
Feet have a rough time of it; they carry us the equivalent of five times around the earth in an
average lifetime, yet we give them less attention than they deserve and we rarely wear the best
shoes for our feet [2].
The main factors indicating the purchasing decision of consumers are two: footwear
appearance and footwear fit. Fit is one of the most important functional aspects in footwear
comfort and together with appearance and price, is one of the most important considerations for
users when purchasing new footwear [3]. The foot provides a crucial contribution to the balance
and stability of the musculoskeletal system. Foot problems are common among a wide group of
people, ranging from simple disorders through to complex diseases and joint deformities [4].

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Footwear shape and dimensions are influenced by the last’s shape and dimensions. The most
important component of the shoemaking is a shoe last, a 3D mold around which a shoe is made.
A shoe last is closely related to the foot and its design is based on many factors such as the foot
shape/size, comfort parameters, shoe fashion/style, type of construction, etc. [5].
Manufacturers attempt to design and develop footwear so that provide a covering for the
foot while exhibiting fashion or style. Product performance on the other hand, can be broadly
evaluated based on its function, form, and fit. It is well known that fit or product compatibility is
necessary for a person to experience comfort, safety and satisfaction during use [6].
Various methods of designing and manufacturing software, along with fashion trends do not
always respect structural and functional requirements of the feet. Because of this, in time,
muscles, bones and joints are overstretched, resulting in a change of morphological and
structural characteristics of the feet [7].

2 3D technology
3D technology has gained a lot of importance in recent years. It is used in various fields
of application, such as medicine, science, engineering, military, entertainment and now in the
apparel industry. In the world of fashion, 3D technology offer the potential for creating made-to-
measure apparel meaning clothing and footwear. The human fit are complex 3D objects having a
wide diversity in their shapes depending upon locality, age, sex, etc. [8].
The use of 3D scanning technology to produce digitized representations of parts of the
human anatomy has the potential to help change the way e wide range of products are designed
and fabricated [9]. There are a lot of applications of 3D scanning technology for digitizing
different part of human body. Their scope it is more than product interaction. With the research
field shifting to more information and better accuracy, 3D scanning has quickly become the
standard in capturing foot geometry. Analysis into the capability of 3D scanning for foot
modeling showed that 3D scans were very reliable and repeatable [10].
3D printing technology is widely used recently for manufacturing of footwear products.
3D printing is a form of additive manufacturing (AM) technology where a three dimensional
object is created by laying down successive layers of materials. Additive manufacturing (AM),
also known as 3D printing, rapid prototyping or solid freeform manufacture. Additive
manufacturing is an umbrella term which covers a range of technologies that utilize layer
manufacturing to fabricate items.

3 Methodology
Designing footwear products is a complex process. Designing the footwear on the
scanned foot, meaning the custom last will provide a good fit. The scope of our work was
implementation of a low cost structured light scanning system for 3D foot scan. In Error!
Reference source not found. are shown the main steps used in these work. They include:
1. 3D foot scanning,
2. Creation of the 3D foot model,
3. Converting in 3D foot last,
4. Comparing the converted 3D foot last with 3D scanned foot model,
5. Shoes design,

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6. Different possibilities for producing custom shoes.

6
2

3
5 4

Fig 1. From 3D foot scans to footwear designing & production

4 Experimental work

4.1 Structured light scanning system

The 3D shape of the foot used for designing custom footwear was taken from the 3D
Structured Light Scanning Systems David Laser-Scan. The system created for the foot scan is
based on low cost 3D structured light system (SLS) based on the software platform of the
DAVID Vision Systems GmbH’s DAVID-Laser Scanner. On the shelf hardware and
equipment’s as light projector, web camera and also open source software can be used for 3D
scanning systems [11]. The schematic view of the system is show in Fig 3. Schematic view of foot
Structured light scanning system
SLS use a video projector instead of the laser. The video projector Acer X110
(1920x1080 pixels) was used to project a number of stripe patterns onto the object. To have a
higher resolution of single scans, the pattern parameter used was “Quality” with 58 number of
patterns. The camera used has a CMOS sensor model uEye UI-1480-C (5MPixel, 6f/s, CE class
A of regulation) and the optic lenses used is Fujinon 1: 1.2/6 mm DF6HA–1B. Camera and
structured light emitter (projector) calibration is based on triangulation calculation. The field of
view of the sensor is fixed by maintaining constant the D distance. This range will be always in
the depth of field of the sensor. Using conventional geometry, the field of view of the sensor is
[12]:

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 P 
  2  tan 1   Eq. (1)
 D f 
Where:
f- is the focal length of the lens
D- is the triangulation base [(A-B)=const, Fig. 2]
P- is the dimension of the CMOS

Fig 2. Setup of the scanning systems

To improve measurement accuracy, the baseline (D) can be increased, or a larger sensor
(P) should be used. These modifications sometimes are not possible, due to the optical system
setup, in which the stability of the system decreases with the increase of (D), and for the shadow
effect (self-occlusion problems increase with (D)). Based on the deformations of the stripe
patterns in these images, DAVID will compute a precise 3D point cloud of the object surface.

Fig 3. Schematic view of foot Structured light scanning system

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After different tests has done, the best scans quality occurs when triangulation angle was from 15
to 20 degree. For an optimal 3D fuse foot scanned object, the minimum number of single scans
was 6 scans [13]. The total time of single acquisition was 1.3 min with a 5Mp of resolution.
Regarding the hardware used in these work (a workstation laptop Fujitsu H 700 series) the frame
per seconds (fps) parameters ranged from 2 to 6 fps. In Fig 4. Scanning process: a) setup; (b, c)
calibration succeeded; (d, e) during scans; f) fusion of single step scans.are shown the steps needed for the
reverse process, from optical setup till the creation of the 3D foot scan model.

Fig 4. Scanning process: a) setup; (b, c) calibration succeeded; (d, e) during scans; f) fusion of single step scans.

4.2 3D data analyzing (Geomagic studio™)

In the reversed engineering processes, especially in the 3D scanning processes there will be
always some imperfection during data capture. Even in the most advanced commercial 3D
scanners a big effort is made by software developers to include the data clean-up process. David
software include data manipulation, however, to perform deep analyze of our scans we used
Geomagic Studio™ software [14]. The workflow (Fig 5. Workflow from 3D foot scanning to custom
shoes design) in this paper will return twice to data manipulation by Geomagic. The first part will
include data manipulation as fill holes, surface smoothness, scans overlap, spike etc. These
procedures will help for better last identification in the following procedure (Fig 6).

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3D scanning workflow for costum shoes design

(VIVID 910; DAVID Laser-Scan)

3D scans and
Fuse and
creation of Perform
Calibration of Is the texture Clean up data save 3D
Scanning process

Hardware setup different point No merge/align

the system needed? from scanning object
clouds of scans
(.obj;.STL...)
Yes

Scan the texture

Data manipulation
(Geomagic Studio)

Export the Compare last Creation of Export and

Inspection of cleaned 3D created with different Are the comparison save dhe
YES
data scans foot scanned foot planes data acceptable? data
dimensions

NO

Prepare the
Defining the Shoe designed
designed model Export dxf
Shoe Maker software

Import the 3D points needed Export the on Production CAD/

for production pattern
scanned foot for last last created personalized technology? CAM
technology configuration
identification for analyze last

3D printing

Export and save

as STL file

Fig 5. Workflow from 3D foot scanning to custom shoes design

Fig 6. Scan data manipulation in Geomagic Studio software

5 Last identification and custom shoes design

After modification and optimization of data scan, our 3D foot model is ready for last
converting and custom shoes design. The software used for these reason is Shoe Maker 2014
[15]. The steps followed for the last identification are shown in Fig 7. The program permit to
import a STL file for last identification wizard. After different point and curves identification are
selected the final attribution of last as: standard, size group and size need to be specified.

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Flattened last (2D) and 3D last will show up if everything was done correctly. To check the error
occurred by the last identification wizard we will compare step 1 with step7 (Fig 7) back in
Geomagic software. These procedure will be shown in coming sections of these work.

Fig 7. Last identification from 3D foot model

5.1 Shoes design

After the confirmation from data comparison (see coming section) that the converting procedure
of last wizard, give accepted deviations between 3D foot scan and last converted (step 7, Fig 7)
everything is ready for she design. We will use the same software Shoe Maker for shoes design.
We designed a pump shoes model. The software is user friendly and easy to use for everyone.
The main steps for designing the custom shoes, are shortly presented in Fig 8.

Fig 8. The process of pump shoes model designing till the exporting of the shoes pattern

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In Fig 8, step 6 show the 3D file exported and being ready for 3D production, meanwhile, step 7
show the 2D pattern extraction for custom shoes production.

6 3D data comparison
In this section we are going to show the data comparison between 3D foot scanned versus
3D last converted. This analyze is needed to check the errors occurred during conversion process
of the last. As shown by the results () generated from 3D Comparison Results, the value of
standard deviation is 1.14 mm and the RMS error is 1.45 mm. These low values show that, the
last identification wizard has been successfully and the 3D last converted represent the real
scanned foot.
Table 1. Comparison result I
Reference Model Foot_converted_right
Test Model 3D scan Fusion
Result
No. of Data Points scans 27148
Tolerance Type 3D Deviation
Units mm
Max. Critical 0.9299
Min. Critical -0.9299
Standard Deviation 1.14
Average Deviation 0.7841 / -0.7635

Fig 9. 3D comparison results I

RMS error 1.45

7 Conclusions
Designing footwear is a very complex process. The work presented in these paper showed a full
cycle of footwear production, starting from 3D foot scanning, to 3D shoes designing, 2D patterns
extraction, till the production of the custom shoes. The implementation of different
software/hardware (part of CAD/CAM Laboratory in Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in
Tirane) is very crucial in the realization of custom shoes design. Different technologies can be
applied after shoes designing as 3D printing (exporting as STL file), traditional ones (exporting
as 2D pattern file) for made to measure shoes.
These will help people, which have feet problems with standard shoes available in the market
creating their own shoe last. Also, it will be possible to create sample prototypes and refining the
same for both functionality and aesthetics.

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