Description: 5 minutes; Lab exercise: 20 minutes
Work easily and improve your surface quality with Skin.
The enhancements to Skin include
Skin is a standard tool in surface modeling used to generate a surface by interpolating a set of parameter curves making up a mesh. Now, you can choose loft-type meshes to create a skinned surface. The loft-type mesh should contain curves for one direction only and without an intersection of curves.
The picture shows loft-type meshes in a skinned surface.

To create a smooth connection from a skinned surface to a neighboring surface, use the Optimization option. This option will increase the surface quality of the skinned surface.
If there is a tangential connection or a degenerated surface, then Smooth is on by default and Optimization is set to Low. If the model has neither of those things, Smooth is disabled and Optimization is Off.
Optimization cannot be used with generalized meshes (one or more boundary curves are missing).
In the image below, Zebra stripes analysis is used to analyze the surface for each optimization level. At the bottom end the surface becomes more distorted with each increased optimization level. For more information on Zebra stripes, please read about Zebra stripes analysis.

Optimization - Off Optimization - Low

Optimization - Medium Optimization - High
Preview your skinned surface. If the outside surface is dull, then the surface is inside out and must be flipped, especially if you want to use Surface Analysis. Turn on Flip and the surface is oriented correctly with the shiny side (face normal) as the outside.
In some cases, such as when a surface connects to a neighboring surface, the surface orientation is fixed and cannot be flipped.
If a curve becomes a boundary of a surface and you want to connect it to another surface, turn on Smooth to create a tangentially smooth connection between the two surfaces.
These exercises provides hands-on experience using the new Skin features in OneSpace Designer Modeling 2005.
Create a series of curves for a mesh, Skin the mesh, and analyze the created surface.
Click 3D Curve
.
Click Spline in the Create Directly section.
Create four spline curves similar to the image above, or use the package file you created from the Create 3D curves lab: 3d_curves.pkg. (Remember - the curves cannot intersect for this example!)
Click Preview. See the skinned surface. Now you can,
Click Flip to reverse the orientation of the surface from dull (-face normal) to shiny (face normal).
Open the Surface Analysis menu and select a type of analysis.
Select an Optimization level. Watch the surface change with each level of optimization.
Click
to complete the operation.