Blender: FAST Character Meshes | Skin Modifier

hello guys and welcome to another blender tutorial today I'm just going to do a quick little tutorial showing you guys how to make um characters with the skin modifier so what you see here is nothing more than a Vertex that we've extruded and we're using some modifiers here primarily the skin modifier um with a mirror and a subdiv to smooth it out and just quickly extruding it and making something from a model sheet now I'm not providing this model sheet and this is not a final product tutorial this is just kind of teaching you guys the little workflow here and the good use for this would be for a base mesh to do your sculpting so you'd get your model sheet you would quickly very quickly in a matter of like half a minute or two minutes make the overall design then you can sculpt it after you've applied the skin modifier or you could even just apply it and then model it further because it makes some pretty nice clean topology so if this is something you'd like to learn keep watching if you want to do something a little bit more complicated you can check out some of my other videos but let's dive into this tutorial if you don't already have a model sheet to follow along with you can find tons of them online you can take a screenshot of this one this is actually provided to me by a friend of mine who said I'm allowed to use it for tutorials but the point here is learning how to use the skin modifier so what it doesn't matter really what model sheet you're working off of it all can kind of work the same so let's start by actually adding in an object we're going to go shift a uh you can use any object I mean go with a cube tab into edit mode and then with everything selected just press F free and type in merge and just go merge at Center and it's going to merge it here at the center of the world in this case you can see we have a little vertex there and that single vertex is all we need for now let's just quickly tab back out into object mode Let's go to our modifiers let's give this a skin modifier under the generate so we go down here to skin and now it's going to add this geometry around that vertex and it's in a form of a modifier what we're also going to do is go and give this a mirror modifier and let's drag the mirror modifier above here so with whatever we do here mirrors on the other side we'll leave clipping disabled for now and then what we're going to do is minimize these and let's go ahead and give it a subdivision surface modifier make sure that one sits at the bottom and let's just bump it up to two and drop that down so now let's tab into edit mode and with this here selected this vertex we can now press G to move it and you can see it moves around but let's just go g z and move it up on the z-axis to about the middle of the body our Vertex or our object origin point is here at the bottom which is usually where we want it to be but if you actually in this case I'm in wireframe I'll simply press Z and go into solid you can see this is what we have right if I now grab that vertex I can go s to scale it but it won't do anything if you want to scale this you have to go control a or command a on a Mac that'll allow you to scale this so in your viewport if you have a model sheet it's always cool to try and work from two perspectives so it you're not making a mistake so let's just come up here to the corner up here you can see a little cross thing left click and just drag open up another window and in this window press free on your number pad to go into your right or for graphic View and this is a really great setup if you um I've gotten to this point just go Ctrl s or command s to save your blend file and at this point it's very easy and straightforward so at the moment we have a Vertex selected here and we've already gone Ctrl a to scale it but what we're going to do now in this view here is we're going to select that we're going to get e to extrude and then Z and extrude it up on the Z okay and now you can see we've scaled it here and in the side here we can see it's a little bit too far back so we're going to go g over here and move it forward and let's scale that one down so if that one's still selected we're going to go Ctrl a and just scale it down and you can see what we've done here you can easily come in here and adjust the science and front view let's select this vertex here let's go e to extrude and z and extrude up to about the middle of the chest here and let's go alt s and scale that one up come here to the side and over here we want to scale it a little bit differently so let's just press n to bring up our properties panel and we're going to come here under the vertex data under the item and let's change the radius on the Y to make it a little bit skinnier so you can see it's only happening on the Y but not in the X we're now going to take that go e to extrude and Z extrude that point up to the bottom of the neck and let's go and take that radius down for both of the the X and Y so like this and then over here in the side we can just go g and move it more to the base of the neck and it's going to be a little bit tricky sometimes to get it just right but it's all about just adjusting it as you go so just grabbing that vertex there and then you can extrude that point up as the neck and make sure that you're looking at the front view whenever you're doing the sort of thing and just scaling accordingly so it all matches up so you can see how easily we're adding in topology so once you have a Little Neck going you can go e to extrude it again it's true to about the middle of the head or maybe a little bit lower and at this point I like to go Ctrl a again and just scale that up and then in the side view here let's just go to that y radius and make it a little bit wider at the front here maybe we can go a little bit more on the X until it makes sense and then e to extrude and Z to extrude up into Z to the top of the head and let's lower it at the front by doing the X and the side view let's bring it down on that y so you can see how easy it is here some things here like are not going to make a whole lot of sense at first so you can always adjust them a little bit afterwards move them around but what you can also do with the skin modifier when you get to like the head part here is grab the middle vertex if you have one in the head then you can go e to extrude and extrude kind of forward to about where the face would be and then you can go Ctrl a and you can scale that down a little bit move it until you get kind of like the bottom part of the face now so now you can see it's matching up over here but over here it's flattened out the head a little bit so just come over here select the top vertex Ctrl a and just scale that up a little bit again like so and the idea here is just to roughly make the initial model because remember you can always sculpt this later on so you can see how quickly we've made this rough body topology let's go over here in our front view let's extract an arm over here by coming to one of the points in the chest maybe about here and I'm going to go in the front view e to extrude and extrude it out too bad where the shoulder is and then we're going to go Ctrl a scale that down and that is a simple way to make a shoulder Point like so make sure it looks okay in your side view you may have to go to wherever your model sheet is look at it through wireframe and make sure it's roughly where the shoulders should be in this case it makes a lot of sense it's okay roughly in the right place and then you can take that point you can go e to extrude extrude it out a little bit and then go control a to scale it up and this is all just a matter of scaling and moving it around as you're extruding making sure it looks okay in both views then you can take that point extrude it usually to about the middle somewhere then go Ctrl a scale a little bit and then e to extrude again bring it to about the wrist area and then Ctrl a and make it a bit smaller always make sure to also go to the top from every now and then just to select a point that is a bit too big you can go to the vertex data over here in this case I'll probably bring it down on on the X a little bit like that grab this one here probably do the exact same thing and just adjust them till they look right there as well there's always going to be a matter of just slightly adjusting and scaling but you can see how quickly we're making the body mesh over here just using the skin modifier now with the legs it can be a little bit more tricky if you select the bottom of where we started here where the stomach is you can now go in your front view e to extrude Z to bring it down into Z bring it to about here and then e to extrude and bring one to the side and if that vertex you're going to go Ctrl a and you're going to scale it down a little bit and then e to extrude that and that's going to make your legs make sure as always to go to your side reference and adjust any new extrusions that I match up there as well and in this case that looks about right I'm going to go Ctrl a just to scale it up a bit and then e to extrude that down to where the knees are and then Ctrl a scaling that down to make it smaller and coming here to the side reference to bring it in a little bit and making some small adjustments once you're happy with that you can usually extrude it down a little bit Ctrl a just to make kind of like a knee area adjusted in the side and then you're going to come e to extrude that vertex all the way down to where the heels are and you're going to go control a and you scale that down so the point I'm trying to convey here to you guys is just how simple it is to use something like the skin modifier to make a simple base mesh now you could either go ahead and you can sculpt this you can apply these modifiers and you can use this as a really nice base for sculpting your character that you want to make so this saves you a lot of work or you can apply this and you can actually come in here and build because if you now go over just your object properties you go over down to the viewport display you can enable wireframe and you can actually see here we're dealing with quite a neat topology I'm going to turn off optimal display there and to do something like this by hand like getting a cube and then extruding things and pulling around the points can take a long time even using the traditional subdivision surface modeling technique it's even a little bit slower than this so this is a great technique for getting some base meshes going getting your initial concept started and you can actually save this out as a file somewhere in the future if you have another human model or character you can just drag this base mesh in with the modifiers you can come in here you can extrude and adjust the points you can add different features it's really just such a simple thing to do so this tutorial today was not about making a final result I just wanted to kind of give get this concept across to you guys so you can see how powerful this technique is and why you should probably try using it in your workflow not a quick little thing I'll show you if you're ever at a point where you want to add in some more points you can select that vertex and you can go Ctrl shift B and you can just kind of bevel a vertex and that gives you some more control points to refine things a little bit but overall I hope you guys are able to use this technique for something cool that you're busy working on but yeah that has been this tutorial for now I'll probably upload this example up to my patreon if you guys want to check it out I do have some other cool stuff I'm working on at the moment but I hope for now this skin modifier here and this little technique I've shown you is something you can use and I'll see you guys in another video

Channel: PIXXO 3D

Views: 45,862

Keywords: blender tutorial, how to model in blender, how to use blender, blender, blender tutorial for beginners

Id: x_UKx6TQFdI

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 07 2022