Hi everyone, I'm Oliver from Blandus.com and in this tutorial we are going to see how
to use the Skin modifier. Skin modifier has been added in latest versions of Blender,
it's going to be released officially into the 2.64 version scheduled for this month and
it help us when creating base meshes to sculpt later. So it base the creation of meshes if
you know sea brush and the sea spheres is something similar because just creating vertices
and shooting them we can create a base mesh out of them. So in this tutorial we are going
to see how to use them and which options we have for creating these meshes. So let's get
started. First I'm going to create a plane and this plane will be our mesh, the mesh that we
are going to apply the Skin modifier into. So we want it to be for starting just a vertex. So
select all the vertices of the plane, press Alt M and at center. So now we only have one vertex.
Let's substitute it with E, set and here we have our first base mesh. We are going to use it into
this. Now before using the Skin modifier we are going to create in this tutorial some kind of
humanoid base mesh. So for this humanoid we know that we want a mirror effect because we are going
to model only one arm and one leg but we want it to have the size of the body of course. So let's
add first a mirror modifier in the X axis of course this axis and let's go here and astute
this one. So we can see the effect. There we go. Now after the mirror modifier we are going to add
the Skin modifier and here we have the base mesh that it creates. Now it's creating a mesh based
on the vertex as you can see and give them some kind of thickness. What we want here is to see
what we are doing in the in the original mesh because the original mesh looks like this and
it's a little difficult to select stuff if we have this mesh over it. So we can disable this one,
probably you already have it disabled. I think it's disabled by default in Blender but I always
have it enabled. So disable it and we can see inside that mesh. Alright so now it's a little
uncomfortable to watch the model like this. So let's add for now a subdivision surface over.
Two subdivisions there we go and here the mesh as you can see is not really symmetrical but we'll
handle that later hopefully because sometimes the Skin modifier generates this kind of not
symmetrical parts in the topology but unfortunately sometimes it's a little difficult to handle but
we will try later. So let's continue as you can see it generates the mesh as we model. Just with
vertices and with edges because if we have faces let's take a look. I'm going to generate a face
from these vertices and you can see that it ignores the face and just take the edges. This is pretty
useful also because sometimes we want a structure like metal structure for a building or something
like that to look to have thickness and this modifier help us achieve that effect. Of course
without the subsurface. Now we have the option to come to a vertex and select is thickness with
control A we can scale it up or down and also after pressing control A we can press X or Y
to define the axis that we want to scale these vertex into. So for now let's forget that and keep
modeling and later we will see all these options here what they mean and what they do. So let's go
ahead and create the arm. Here we want our legs you see this circle we are going also to see what
it is later. So I'm not going to create a here masterpiece or a great character is just to show
you how this works. Of course if you go to Blender Artist or some forum like that you will see
that there are people that has created a lot of great stuff only using the skin modifier so it's
possible to do it not in this tutorial. Okay and here we are going to have the mesh the head sorry
I select these ones we subdivided of course here we can use all the tools that we normally use
for modeling so it's nice. We have these ones and these ones we want to scale them to have some
kind of nice head there we have the neck. Okay now let's go for the hands here I'm not creating
awesome hands just going to show you how you can create some fingers. So as you can see the topology
is generated on the fly as we model or move the vertices so you need to do it in a way that it
doesn't generate weird stuff for example if you see something like this you better move the vertex
until you find a nice position for it. This looks fine and now from here you can start adding your
fingers and as you can see it looks a little weird like sausages or something so you can start
moving vertices around until you find the correct way. Now you can select these three, you can select
several vertices at a time and with Ctrl A we can scale them to make them look more like fingers.
Alright so now let's take a look at the options we have in this modifier. First we have here the
option that is disabled right now because we are in the edit mode which is the create armature
options this will create from this from this mesh that we are creating it will create an armature
that allows us to move and let's add here this and move our mesh and pose it right pretty similar
to the sea spheres in sea brush. Of course that armature we can use it later for the final
character but well it's not probably intended for that but anyway we will see how to use it later.
The branch smoothing is an option that will set up the way in which branches are being smooth.
A branch is a vertex that has more than two edges coming out from it like this cross here the fingers
or here the chest. Alright so let's see here at the fingers how this option affects it so you can
see it's like more or less smooth. Here in this model it's not having great effects but in some
meshes probably it marks the difference between a bad topology with weird stuff to a better one.
Alright now a smooth shading of course it makes the the face is not to be generated flat but smooth
right we are going to let it like this now. Now mark loose and clear loose is something that I
want to show you. A loose vertex is a vertex that won't be computed into the skin modifier it will
pass through it and will join this one to this one directly and this one won't have an actual
effect on the generated topology. Let's see how it works. Mark loose after selecting it with
marked loose and you can see that the generated topology goes from this one to this one and this one
even if we scale it with control A won't have any effect on the generated topology right which is
exactly what we want. Now we can clear it whenever we want with clear loose and also we can select
several ones and mark them as loose as you can see. Nice now mark root will define where the
topology starts to be generated I don't understand that very well but I think that the the geometry
is made with some rotations and all that stuff coming from the root bone right which now is this
one. If we change it sometimes it changes how the topology is being created let's take a look.
Mark as root and you can see that now the topology is more symmetrical before it was generated from
here so you can see that the geometry here is like coming from that part but if we mark this
one as root it's more symmetrical all right also it defines the root bone of the skeleton that will
be generated with the create armature option right. Now equalize ready okay this is a pretty weird
name I mean it's not very intuitive but it have a nice and useful effect so we can select one for
example and scale it only into one axis like this one and suddenly we say like oh no but I wanted to
be you know uniform in both axes so you can go here equalize ready and it's kind of square again
and we can scale it with control A normally and put it right where we want it now this one we can
probably scale it like this and we can solve some problems here before going to the next step
right in this tutorial I'm going to show you the workflow for actually going to to a model okay so
here you can see that just generated some generating some more vertices you can arrange
problems in the in the mesh okay all right so let's call it done right just for this for the
purpose of this tutorial I think is enough so we can take it place it on the ground and now let's
see the options first we have here create armature so we are going to create the armature but before
we are going to apply the mirror because if we create it right now we are going to create just
one side of the armature because it's the one that the scheme modifier is working on so first
we are going to apply this one that's it now this this scheme modifier this is the mesh that we
created is symmetrical and all the stuff so we can go ahead and create an armature from it there
we go you can see that here in the root where we had selected the root of the of the skeleton it
created another bone there to be the root now as you can see we can already mostly animated we could
animate this one but what we want here is to now apply the the scheme modifier because right now
this is only moving the vertices of the base mesh not the actual generated topology right and
also we can to scope this one because it's being generated on the fly by the scheme modifier alright
so it's not actually useful right so here the symmetry axis is just to help the scheme modifier
to understand how the symmetry is working in the model because it doesn't generate geometry for us
in a symmetrical way like if we create a model or a vertices in the left side it will go into
replicating to the right side nothing like that that's why we used the mirror modifier so here
what we are going to do is to apply this modifier right now the armature works sadly mostly sadly
the same not a sadly the same but mostly and but it deforms the final mesh but the final mesh is
nothing like this the final mesh is this very cubicle guy but is in offer now so this is what's
happening okay so you can start animating already and say like hey I'm Oliver from ledges.com yeah
yeah I'm having fun with this so what you should do now is to apply a multi-resolution modifier
and subdivided a couple of times so now we have a sadly the same that we have before with
the subdivision modifier but now we can actually sculpt this one of course we can move this like
this or this we should make it in a in a symmetrical way all right but we should put the arms in T
like this is like 60 60 degree this is not the purpose of the tutorial so you better try to create
the model into a really T shape or something that is going to be useful then when sculpting for now
let's sculpt it so let's go to the sculpt mode and you can see that we can start the sculpting
let's put the symmetry on the x-axis and just start the sculpting so as you can see it's a really
easy and fast way to generate your base mesh okay it's really nice and as I said this is a really
basic and weird model what I did here right now but if you go in if you go to some to some forum
and see what people is doing with this modifier is really amazing really amazing so if your version
of Lender doesn't have this yet you can just download some newest version from graphical.org
but anyway in a couple of weeks all the versions of Lender should have this one because it's
a Blender 2.64 will be released this month if everything goes as scheduled so yeah I think
that I don't need to show you anymore that this is a sculptable mesh you of course you can
sculpt over it is now a normal mesh and the scheme modifier is not here anymore so I hope
this tutorial helped you to understand what the scheme modifier does and the the the useful stuff
that it has generating the the armatures and all this is really useful is really fast to generate
base meshes that you can sculpt and yeah I hoped it was useful so see you in the next tutorial and
happy blending!
