Unified Skin Tutorial By Ken Brilliant The adaptive method of skinning ZSpheres requires an organized approach to their construction.You must pay attention to how spheres branch from each other.In contrast, the unified skinning method lets you work in a much looser, freeform style. For example, we can use many ZSpheres to quickly block out the major forms of a head. Once skinned, the mesh can be edited and modeled to completion. To make a head similar to the one in this example, start with a simple chain of ZSpheres: This represents the profile. Make sure to have X symmetry turned on. The jaw line is added, branching from the “chin” ZSphere. 2 ZSpheres are added to form the side of the head, with one brought out for cheekbones. Brows are added through a chain of 3 ZSpheres. A nose is formed by adding a ZSphere off of the top head ZSphere, and dragged down the face. Two more ZSpheres are created off the side of this one to make the nostril area. If you want more ZSpheres for shaping, simply click to add them in the middle of a chain.It is best to start off with fewer ZSpheres and add as you need them. This will make editing easier. Here we have the completed ZSphere model. ZSpheres have been used to make the major neck muscles and even the collar bone. Making a unified skin is as simple as pressing the Make Unified Skin button in the inventory panel. This illustration shows the skin made with the default values. If you find the definition between spheres too much, you can adjust the Skin Smoothness slider to make a softer transition between the spheres. Here we have the same model with a Skin Smoothness of 100: From here, standard editing tools can be used to shape the mesh. If there aren’t enough faces to form the details you desire, mask and Divide areas or set the Resolution higher before making the Unified skin. Here is the final head modeled from the Unified skin mesh. By using this method, the head and neck of this character were roughed out easily, with a good distribution of polygons across the whole surface. This would be more difficult to achieve when starting from a standard Z primitive such as a Sphere3D.