I’m trying to improve my Blender abilities beyond “Extrude, Scale, Extrude, Scale, Loop Cut, Extrude…” to make a skeleton monster for a board game. I’ve used Bezier curves to draw the spine and ribs. I can convert the bezier curves to a mesh, then use the Skin and Subdivide modifiers to make my lines into a decent looking ribcage. My problem is that I’m not the best artist (by a long shot!), and so I’d really like to be able to modify my bezier curves after the whole skin/subdivide process so that I can get them looking right. Of course, I can’t do that because they’re not curves any more!
I know that I can use Alt-D to make a linked duplicate of an object, and I tried doing this so that I could leave one duplicate as a curve and the other as a mesh, but of course the duplication is perfect and so they both get converted to a mesh at the same time. Does anyone have any advice about how I should can proceed here?
if you have subdiv THEN skin in your modifier stack, you shouldn’t need too many vertexes to define the ribcage in the first place. maybe about 4 per rib.
Thanks for the advice! I’ve made a cube and added some ring cuts to be the ribs, then deleted the extra edges and followed your advice about doing the subdiv, then the skin, then another subdiv and it’s looking way better than before (and has kept the geometry really easy to work with). There’s a few points where the skin isn’t rendering correctly - do you have any recommendations about how to resolve that, or is it just fiddle with the settings until it looks good?
This is designed to be 3D printed, so I’ll probably need to either fatten it up or hide some filler/support inside the ribcage, but I’m super happy with how dynamically Blender can create these complex shapes based on some really simple work on my part!
