Blender 3D: Characters, Machines, and Scenes for Artists

Using the Mesh Deform modifier to skin the character

The Mesh Deform modifier has been introduced in Blender for the production of the short open movie Big Buck Bunny and it's a very easy and quick way to skin medium and high resolution characters' meshes. Although the utility of this modifier really shows the skinning of fat, chubby characters, it will be useful to see the way it works even if applied to a quite skinny character such as the Gidiosaurus.

Getting ready

First, we must prepare the deforming cage, which is a simplified low poly mesh totally enveloping the character's mesh; to do this, in our case, we can start from an already made object:

1. Open the Gidiosaurus_skinning_03.blend file.
2. Click on the File | Append menu (or press Shift + ...