Skin Modifier

At some point in December, this blogpost about a skin modifier showed up in my Youtube recommended. Since the title advertises this as a simple way to create base meshes for sculpting, I was very interested in this modifier.





Essentially, this modifier takes a simple base/line of vertices and creates a mesh around those vertices. This allows us to take a stick figure and create a very basic human body out of it.




The steps of this are very simple but to keep a record of these steps here they are:

1. Create a stick figure with vertices



2. Add skin modifier and subdivision surface





3. Use control+A on various vertices to scale up the size



4. If there is distortion on the mesh this can be fixed by rescaling vertices around the messed up area or moving vertices it to a different position

5. Apply modifier


This modifier is very simple to use but at the same time, I found when creating my mesh of the grown son to be very helpful. When I first started I had difficulties with immediately trying to jump into mirroring the mesh as you are trying to create it. I found that it is best to do the whole body(sans hands and feet) and then just choose the best side to mirror afterward. I also had trouble scaling the vertices but I found after trying to create a mesh a couple of times it will eventually work(it could have been the mirror modifier but I am not sure). Other than those little problems I thought the base mesh looked really good and was easier to work with than the metaballs when I began sculpting. This definitely something I want to do from now on instead of metaballs because of how simple it is and how nice the results are.



Work Log:
Monday:MLK Day
Tuesday,Thursday,Friday:End of MP2 Blogposts
Wednesday:rigging model