Quickly Create Base Meshes for Sculpting | Skin modifier | Blender 2.8

hello in this video I will show you how you can start off your scopes by building base meshes there are several good ways of creating a base mesh and often a combination of the different ways is the best option this episode will go over the skin modifier and in later episodes I'll go over meta balls and boolean operations I've made this tutorial in blender 2.8 but all the controls are exactly the same in 2.7 they're just in slightly different locations so the very quickest way of starting off the sculpt is to subdivide your cube by pressing ctrl v and that automatically sets up a subdivision surface with the amount of detail depending on the number you click so control 3 will give you 3 4 4 and 5 5 so I'm press control 5 and got 5 subdivisions then I can apply that change to my sculpting tab tick for dyeing top o button up here don't worry about the warning but do be aware that this will modify your topology a great deal there's also the dying topo down here where you can get the brush size and detail and then you can start sculpting away that's the very quickest way but this isn't very useful for when we want to create something like a person because we have to grab the snake hook tool here and start pulling it around trying to get a torso and then a head here and then it's all flat over here and it's quite tricky to work with so that's why we need base meshes they quickly get us to a point so we don't have to go around to sculpting like this in order to get our base mesh and it's a much quicker way of getting to a good starting point so let's go back to modeling with the tab up here and I'll go back to object mode with tab and delete what we've got there now I'm going to press it shift a to add my cube again so we're back to the start so how can I make a good base mesh well there's several ways one really good way is with the skin modifier so let's look at the skin modifier first I go into edit mode with tab so I've got edit mode up here and with all my vertices selected make sure you're in vertices mode up here or you can press 1 on your keyboard then press alt M that will merge all your vertices into the center because all we need for this is 1 vertice you can also get there by deleting all your vertices except as long as you get to the same place now I can create a base mesh by pressing Ito extrude and pulling out that vertice so I've just pulled it upwards I'll go into front view for this because it'll be easier and I'll just grab that and pull it back into the middle and this will be my leg hip it's also a couple of those shoulder and all the time just pressing e to extrude elbow forearm I don't want to do the hands at the moment and I will do those separately with either Metta balls all the skin modifier and then add them to this mesh later let's grab this one e to extrude and pull up the neck and the head now I've only done one side so I can select these three vertices here shift D to duplicate shift D and then pull them over there and scale in the X s X -1 so scale in the x axis -1 I'll grab that put it over a bit select these two and press F to fill I'll do the same with this side select these two after fill now once I have my base mesh like this I can go across the modifiers that's where this spanner is if you're in 2.79 they'll just be across at the top here but they all do the same thing add modifier skin modifier now this would be fine to work on but it's much easier if we also add these subdivision surface modifier I'll put the views up slightly so we've got a bit of detail now if we want to add some thickness to this we can go to wireframe mode with Zed and you can select each of your vertices and press ctrl a and scale them up to the desired size so ctrl a to scale if you feel like let's say you want another vertice in here then you can subdivide the two of these in blender 2.79 it's with your spacebar or in blender 2.8 right click and you get the mesh context menu and press subdivide then ctrl a and you can scale these things up you can select two at a time and scale them up if you want to and let's say for some reason you wanted everything in line because you hadn't done it in front view and they were all skewed off in one direction then just select several and scale in whatever axis you want to flatten them to in this case Y and then press 0 and then you can flatten your vertices like that now if I go back to solid mode with Zed on my keyboard you can see that occasionally it does this sort of thing and we can't have that for sculpting usually you can get out of that by clicking on the vertices near the distortion and scaling it and you can see there the distortion changes as I scale so it looks a bit odd at the moment but I can sculpt out the detail later on also if scaling hasn't worked often just moving it into a different position helps as well but you do have to go around checking that you haven't got any of those anomalies now let's say we wanted to go to sculpting we have to go back to object mode with tab object mode up here and apply our skin modifier and subdivision surface modifier remember to always apply the modifiers from the top down so you won't get any errors now you may find this fine for sculpting but many times you want to have a completely symmetrical object so what I would normally do is use the auto mirror tool that's not available yet in blender 2.8 as far as I'm aware I'm sure it will arrive soon so you just make sure your pivot point is in the middle of your mesh or roughly in the middle and then click the auto mirror and it will divide it in half in this case without the alter mirror tool we can use the bisect at all so if I go back into edit mode now I'll select all I'll go to front view go up to the mesh menu and press bisect that will give me a line that I can cut through my shape say somewhere around there and I can change the position with this handy tool here and I've got the parameters here as well I don't need to fill the hole that it leaves because I'm going to mirror and I'm going to clear the outer difficult sometimes to see which is the inner and outer but it doesn't matter in this case okay so now we've got a bisection we need to make sure that our pivot point or object center is right in the middle so we can select all we'll go to front mode for this and I'll grab my object and move it into the middle like this slightly away from the center to give me a bit of room for maneuvering then I can go up to the modifiers add modifier mirror and it will mirror across the other side it's not quite merged in the middle so I can select this loop with alt left click for a change grab that in the X with G then X and pull them together oh do remember to have clipping enabled so now when I grab in the x-axis it will clip them together so now our mesh is ready and it's purely symmetrical I can apply the mirror in object mode so tab to object mode apply the mirror and then let's go into scope mode and we're ready for sculpting and now we've got a base mesh it's much quicker to create our model at this point we can turn down top o on and start pulling things around into position now when you have a mesh like this the inflate brush can be really handy so I want to broaden my shoulders I can just get my inflate brush and pull that out more than the arms a bit pull that out and so on and you can see that the mesh changes as I use it with the dyeing Topo turned on and start off with a very low detail which is a high pixel count here as long as you've got relative detail on and go across creating your mesh then you can use the snake hook tool here and start pulling a mesh around as you see fit but it helps to have some sort of shape before you start doing this hence the skin modifier and how useful it is so hopefully get the idea from that and we go too far with this model in the next episode I'll tell you how you can create things like hands with things like the feet I would generally add them with the skin modifier but hands can be a lot more tricky and detailed so in the next episode I'll talk about metal balls and if I can fit it in boolean operations so I hope that helps and thanks for watching

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 597,544

Keywords: learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, texture, paint, game, material, guide, easy, sculpt, base, mesh, starting, point, Blender 2.8

Id: wCI8ZbTBP1w

Length: 9min 2sec (542 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 07 2018