CompuServe Messages

<<Skin uses the concept of sliced objects>> >true, but you can also use one mesh to define the skin object Yeah, I knew this but had never tried just one object, primarily because I got Skin before Bones Pro, and the whole concept of using it back then was to be able to animate using IK (and still have a smooth mesh). But you raise an interesting point, and as one whose model (Hugger) has been held to me as an example of MetaReyes, you're probably the best one to answer. Since you've used a variety of modeling techniques, do you have any feel for what a (novice, or basically someone with no talent, like myself) should be using in this smooth skin/animation arena? I've now played with a Metaballs PXP, and was sort of thinking that maybe the best thing for me would be to use it in combination with shaper/lofter/smoothing to end up with a mesh I could Bone (so to speak). Does this sound like a feasible general purpose modeling technique for organics? Also, while I haven't played too much with it, I find that my first passes at "attaching" a metaball object to a mesh with Smooth look rather tacky, and I'm assuming I need to tessalate faces at the mesh end (the metaball already has a LOT of faces) to get the smoothness I need. If this IS the case, do you have any general guidelines for that? Are you using Optimize to do this, and if so, what settings? Do you tessalate the whole object, or just selected faces (actually, I haven't looked at Optimize so long I'm not even sure this last is a possibility)? Thanks in advance for sharing any wisdom.