利用者:Mats Halldin/Skin Modifier

Skin Modifier

The Skin modifier "skins" a mesh around vertices and edges. It is a quick way to generate base meshes for sculpting and/or smooth organic shapes with arbitrary topology.

Description

Subdivision Level

Number of levels of Catmull-Clark subdivisions to use to generate the quad mesh

Evolution Steps

Number of steps used to approximate the original "Z spheres" shape.

Threshold

Controls how close the output mesh is to the "Z spheres". Valid range is -0.5 to 0.5.

Basic usage

• Add a plane. ⇆ Tab into edit mode and AltM » At Center to merge all vertices. E then Z to extrude the vertex along the Z axis.
• In the Object data menu, expand the Skin Layers panel and hit the + button.

Skin Node Set Flag One of the mesh's vertices must be set to Root. If you by accident delete the default root vertex, select a vertex, hit the Skin Node Set Flag button, and in the Mesh Tools menu set the new vertex to root.

• In the modifiers' menu, add a Skin modifier. To see the result in edit mode, click the "Use modifier while in edit mode" button.
• ⇆ Tab into edit mode and start extruding. To see the actual "Z spheres", Z to change to wireframe mode. These spheres are actual meshes with a lot of polygons, so performance issues might occur on older computers.

Mirror modifier To use the Skin modifier together with a Mirror modifier, make sure the latter is placed before the former in the modifiers stack. The Mirror modifier must be set to x mirror and must be applied before the Skin modifier.

External links

• Skin Modifier Development at Blender Nation — An early demonstration of the skin modifier by Nicholas Bishop (March 2011)
• Ji, Zhongping; Liu, Ligang; Wang, Yigang (2010). B-Mesh: A Fast Modeling System for Base Meshes of 3D Articulated Shapes, Computer Graphics Forum 29(7), pp. 2169-2178. — The work this modifier is based on (direct link to PDF)
• Related thread on Blender artists