Creating realistic basemeshes with the blender skin modifier; Help?

I have been struggling with the skin modifier since I started using it. I don't know any other way to make basemeshes for sculpting, and the boolean method didn't work for me as my proportions were all over the place. I'm not sure what else to do.


Here's my main struggle today: https://imgur.com/gallery/2oLju


As you can see, from the reference I was trying to make a realistic male character as I don't make realistic characters often out of difficulty and I don't make male characters often as i'm not good at male anatomy, but I tried to give it a shot.


I didn't even make it to the basemesh.


I'm not sure what I should do at this point; I was thinking that sculpting characters in blender just isn't for me but I can't afford 7brush and don't know how I feel with sculptris, if anyone has any resources for learning sculptris/making basemeshes with sculptris please let me know because I am not doing good with the software.


But also, if there are any blender tutorials/help on making basemeshes for sculpting please let me know also as that would help a lot. Thank you for listening.


(Also I should specify that I am in a money drought right now so I can't afford to get a cgcookie membership at the moment.)

  • Dolores 74 (dolores74) replied

    Hi there Le Mons hater,

    The boolian add-on does not work for me either.

    I went to your page @ imgur. For a base-mesh you have an awesome start. Have you taken the time to study real pro’s with what kind off a base-mesh they start ?

    Take a look at this time laps video. As you can see, there is nothing wrong with your base-mesh.

    If you are not good at sculpturing yet you can leave details, like fingernails, when you are doing the re-topology.

    Here is a free video how to model fingernails.

  • Jonathan Lampel replied

    Hey iihatelemons , one thing to note is that if you're going to be sculpting this with dynamic topology, it really doesn't matter as long as all the pieces are there (though part of the head looks flipped, but if you pull the jaw up it should be fine). It's always nice to have a perfect base mesh, but it's not always necessary. The hands can even start out as just mittens without individual fingers if you'd like. You can always move proportions around with the grab brush later or pull out new fingers with the snake hook brush. 

    If you do want to make a base mesh with perfect topology for multi-res sculpting, you'll have to model it from scratch without the skin modifier.