Quad [ 4 SIDE ] is the way to go, and people use it as a base because they don’t analyse the tools behavior to get good result i have lot of model ready for poly-modeling not sculpting and i get nice result with nice topology here are some example I have discover a lot of tricks while modeling with the SkinMod.
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I can even do nice hole with some tricks, cloth, drive the topology flow as I want here some weapons concept and insect with the skin modifier
Kakachiex, I’m not the kind of guy who asks for tutorials or books or guides when I see great stuff on the net, but the behaviour of the skin mod is so unpredictable to study by myself and your use of the skin modifier is just outstanding!
I’d buy your book / guide /tutorial for sure.
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I’m making my blog and working on some video tutorial I hope i can finish it because of my work I don’t have much time
@kakachiex2 very nice results! the beetle impressed me expecially.
you give me courage to try and keep using skinmod.
@oris
is good to hear that I’m giving you courage to keep using the skinMod thanks is really a powerful tool that need more love from dev.
That’s the thing that is infuriating with the skin modifier.
It’s an utterly amazing tool, a fantastic feature in which you can build nice stuff and base meshes a very very lot faster than when modelling the classic way
But it has very bad nasty problem , in which you can have horrible unwanted holes, missing faces and internal faces being generated.
And those flickering/changing etc… by just moving your skin vertices by a single a pixel
bad area being generated :
moving a single pixel the selected vertex :
moving it another pixel :
so you have often to tediously test with a combination of moving a skin vertex and scaling it how to have the skin modifier not generating those horrible things, so you can obtain an usable result.
The day the devs will manage to find a solution to that problem that has been with the skin modifier since forever, will be a joyous great day 
, especially considering how great and useful the skin modifier can be.
@sanctuary
Yes you’re right those limitation make the skinMod a nightmare for beginner and intermediate user I have experimenting a lot so i Know how to solve some problem it has become instinctive for me I will share some videos tut. on how to master the skinMod and how to solve some problems wen dealing with the skinMod.
you can use stuff like the smooth, lap smooth, displace after the subdv mod for further effects or refinement. you can even use planar displacement at something like 2.5 to reduce the resolution, disconnected edge are easily fixed later. even remesh after the smooth mod.
but agreed with Sanctuary about the flickering geometry problem. though with patience one come up with a lot of workable stuff.
if you’re having trouble with the hands or feet, do it separately as it’s seems to be easier done that way and connect it later after the mods are applied.
@iceking
Making some part separately is one way to go and more predictable for newbies here some tips:
- wen moving vertex or scaling always use shift for small increment specially if you have flickering problems
- keep some distance between vertex branches [ small scaling, moving with shift ]
- sometime if you get hole add a vertex in the middle of the two vertex that are giving the problems
- always place the [ Root vertex ] in the spine of the model, you can move it in other place will give different result
- you can have more than one vertex Root in the same model by duplicating the [ vertex Root ] or duplicate any vertex and make it [ Root ] this give the user more flexibility
Here is ma hand setup I hope it is useful for you
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Some more complex character with eye socket I want to motivate developer to fix the Skin_Mod limitation
Here some more detailed Skin Mod creature and Aliens the possibilities are endless with this toll I can do anything from character to hard surface etc…
And could the reason for these being so hard to fix due to trying to force everything to have a maximum of 4 sides?
For an algorithm like the Skin Modifier, that is just an extremely low amount of geometry that it is allowed to work with (so I would think it makes the creation of valid forms more difficult).
Thanks Iceking you can get good result with this tool I’m planing a series of tutorial for this level of result
Thanks Iceking you can get good result with this tool I’m planing a series of tutorial for this level of result
that would be very nice!
That will be awesome… can’t wait.
I had no idea that it was possible to obtain these excellent base models only using skin modifier. This tutorials serie would be great.
