Creating a base mesh with the Skin modifier
Before we sculpt our alien, we need to have a base mesh that has roughly its proportions. If you want, you can use the methods that you've learned in the previous chapter in order to model it, but here we are going to use a cool modifier that Blender has to offer: the Skin modifier. Its goal is to create a geometry around each vertex. We can simply extrude some vertices as if we were doing a real wire armature, and the Skin modifier will add volume around it. For each vertex, we have control over the volume size. Let's start our base mesh:
We will start by entering in to the Edit Mode of our default cube. Then we will select all the vertices (A) and merge them to a sole vertex at the center (press Alt + M and click on the center). We now have our root vertex that will be the pelvis of our alien.
It's now time to add a Skin modifier to our object in the modifier stack. As you can see, our vertex is controlling a new geometry around it. The geometry...
