8

Skin Wrap Modifier 809
morph. Other wise, the software creates a new
morph automatically and applies the edits to that
morph.
Show Driver B one Matr ix—Shows the matrix tripod
of the current bone.
Show Mor p h Bone Ma tri x —Shows the tripod of the
orientation of the active morph.
Show Current Angle—Shows pie wedges depicting
the angles between the driver bone matrix and the
morph b one m atrix. These are color coded: red for
the angle about the X axis; blue for t he angle about
the Y axis; and green for the angle about the Z axis.
Show Edges—Highlights the edges connected to
morphable vertices in orange.
This is useful when a tessellating modifier such as
MeshSmooth is applied to the skinned mesh above
the Skin Morph mo difier, to see the actua l mesh
being affected by Skin Mor ph.
Matrix Size—Thesizeofeachtripod.
Bone Size—The size of the bone display.
Sk in Wrap Modifier
Make a selection. > Modify panel > Modifier List >
Object-Space Modifiers > Skin Wrap
The Skin Wrap modifier allows one or more objects
to deform another. While Skin Wrap is flexible
enough to serve a variety of needs, it’s primarily
intended for animating a high-resolution object,
such as a character mesh, with a low-resolution
one.
The low-resolution object doing the deforming is
called a
control object ,andthehigh-resolution
object it’s affecting (that is, the one w ith the Skin
Wrapmodifier)isthe
base object .Abaseobject
can be any type of deformable object. Als o, in
this topic,
control vertex refers to a vertex on the
control object, and
point refers to a vertex on the
base object.
With Skin Wrap, you can modif y the struc t ure and
topology of the high-resolution object after setting
up the animation. The animation remains intact
because it is actually cont ained in the control
object.
In most cases, when using Sk in Wrap, the control
object is positioned ne ar the modified base o bject,
and then bound to the latter using the modifier’s
Add function. By default, moving a vertex in
the control object affects nearby vertices in the
base object. Additional options a llow faces in
the control object to affect the nearest points in
the base object instead (Blend To Base Object).
Conversely, points in the control object can affect
faces in the base object (Face Deformation).
Skin Wrap offers a great deal of control in that
youcansetadifferentstrengthvalueforeach
control vertex, as well as the shape of its volume
of influence. You can also convert the Skin Wrap
effect to a Skin modifier applied to the high- res
model, suitable for use with game engines. And
theabilitytoanimatewithmultiplecontrolobjects
lets a technical director assign animation of
different parts of a complex character mesh to
various artists.
Tip: If you use a control object to which
non-uniform scaling has been applied, its vertices
will have non-spherical volumes of influence,
which can lead to unexpected results. In such
a case , before adding the control objec t to the
modifier, apply
Reset XForm (page 1–418) and
then collapse the stack.
See also
Skin Wr ap Patch Modifier (page 1–815)