Doc:2.6/Manual/Modifiers/Generate/Skin

Skin Modifier

Mode: Any mode

Panel: Modifiers

The Skin modifier uses vertices and edges to create a skinned surface, using a per-vertex radius to better define the shape.

It is a quick way to generate base meshes for sculpting and/or smooth organic shapes with arbitrary topology.

Note that faces in the input are ignored by the Skin modifier.

Options

Skin modifier UI.

Create Armature

Create an armature for your object.

Branch Smoothing

Smooth the intersection vertices.

Selected Vertices

Mark Loose

Mark the selected vertices as loosing points. Loosing defines points which merge their faces with each other to fill gaps.

Clear Loose

Take the Loose away. The initial behavior.

Mark Root

Defines the root points of the object. These are the center of the object.

Equalize Radii

Makes the skin radii of selected vertices equal on each axis.

Example

• Select the cube. ⇆ Tab into edit mode and AltM » At Center to merge all vertices at one point. E then Z to extrude the vertex along the Z axis.

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.

Simple creature, made with only the Skin modifier.

• In the modifiers' menu, add a Skin modifier.
• ⇆ 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.
• Try to get sketch results similar to the picture (Simple creature, made with only the Skin modifier.), through extruding the vertices of the object.
• Use CtrlA to change the size of the different regions within the creature.
• Use Mark Loose at regions like the neck, to merge these faces more together.
• To get smoother results, activate Smooth Shading and use Ctrl3 on the object.

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