Pushed a couple updates to the skin-modifier branch: output-face attributes and non-square skin limbs. These have both been frequently requested.
The skin modifier UI now has a material selector. It shows all the material slots of the active object, and the selection will be used for all faces output by the skin modifier.
Similarly, all faces will be either flat-shaded or smooth-shaded depending on the selection made in the combo box.
The second change, non-square limbs, means that you can now scale the X and Y axes of vertices independently. It uses the usual scaling mechanism, so pressing (for example) SKEY, XKEY will work as expected. Note that rotation is still entirely automatic, so you can’t choose the exact angle of a non-square limb, but should be OK for many cases.
Code is in the usual place.
Update: as suggested here, I’ve removed the material selection in favor of simply using the object’s first material slot.
Great job, can’t wait to try it out, the skin mod is getting better and better!
the non square feature miss me a week ago.
For the material I ‘don’t understand why you don’t get it from the base vertices?
Vertices don’t store materials.
how i install this addon? which files do i need to download?
This code exists as a separate branch of Blender rather than an addon; to use it you’ll need to either pull the code from the Github repository and build it, or wait for someone to upload it to graphicall.org.
okay..Thank you for sharing :)
I just tried the latest build by demohero and most of the features work like a charm (I love the non-square limbs and shading options, I do keep flatview on though as it helps to see topology better), as usual I play around and to create something crazy and as always I seem to have the bad luck of being the one who runs headfirst into some bugs. There are a few issues (which I also had with the last build I used) which was the fact that very strange holes sometimes occur and I have no clue as to why that is:
[IMG]http://i1054.photobucket.com/albums/s494/Dinokaizer/Holesinthemesh.png[/IMG]
Also extruding the mesh in itself to create a hole or dent seems to work only when it feels like it and creates inverted normals, granted though the inverted normals thing is very easy to fix.
It’s a bit hard to tell from just an image, but I think that the bug you are seeing with holes has been fixed since that build.
About creating holes, this only works on branch vertices (vertices with three or more adjacent edges.)
I downloaded the latest build again and I was able to produce another hole, this one slightly weirder https://i1054.photobucket.com/albums/s494/Dinokaizer/holesagain.png
I seem to have the bad luck of being the one who encounters these things the most hehe
Can’t really tell what’s gone wrong there, but if you post a .blend file I’ll see if I can find the problem.
I was able to recreate the second one again (first one appears to be fixed, I couldn’t recreat it) here is a blend file showing the problem of the second one
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/13955
Thanks, found some problems there and pushed updates fixing two separate bugs.
The output is still slightly asymmetric, but leaving that todo for now (in you case, the asymmetry can be fixed by slightly tweaking some vertex positions.)