This was a "Shoe Project" for class. The objective was to model a shoe, any kind of shoe - of your choosing, using Maya modeling tools, and MentalRay. I felt most shoe configurations were rather boring. I felt that a so called "old-school," 70's disco era roller skate would be a more interesting opportunity for the assignment. The original shoe had the same colors for the upper, but I did change the wheel color to a red. They're shiny because the new rubbery urethane wheels were shiny fresh from the mold. The metal parts were textured with a custom shader my instructor helped me to create. The upper is a combination of Lambert and Blinn for the yellow vinyl elements. The roller skate was rendered in MentalRay with an HDRI image-based lighting setup and no spotlights. I eventually made a turntable animation (will be shown soon) of this roller skate to show off its pre-smoothed geometry with the smoothed, rendered geometry.