Editing Skins

How to make modifications to part walls defined in Lattice Commander

Simplified, skins are hollowed meshes. More accurately, a skin is the dataset of a mesh where all its triangles have a thickness value assigned. Actions like deleting a triangle will properly produce a hole, for example.

The standard display color of a skin is a reddish brown. When a skin is being edited, it is colored in a light blue.

In the project tree, select the skin.
In the main menu, click Edit Body.
Tip: You can also click the skin in the display to begin editing.
To finish editing the skin, click Finish in the main menu.

Editing a skin is only a temporary state. You can enter and exit editing at any time. Also, editing or clicking Done after editing does not void or clear any undo states that happened before or during editing, so you can undo and redo even individual edits such as deleting triangles or changing its thickness.

While the skin is being edited, you have three selection tools available, Select Faces (for individual triangles), Select Surfaces (for triangles bordering the clicked triangle as well as all triangles bordering the previous until an edge sharper than a specified threshold is encountered), and Select Shells. Use these tools in combination with mouse and the keys Shift and Ctrl to make your selection:

Action	No key	Ctrl	Shift
Click on a triangle	Selects the triangle. Any other, currently selected triangles become deselected.	Toggles the selection state of the triangle.	Adds the triangle to the current selection.
Click and drag to draw a selection frame	Selects the triangles intersected by or included in the selection frame. Any other, currently selected triangles become deselected.	Toggles the selection state of the triangles intersected by or included in the selection frame.	Adds the triangles intersected by or included in the selection frame to the current selection.

Now you can delete the selected triangles with the Delete key or by clicking Remove in the context view, or adjust their thickness using the Thickness setting in the context view.

Tip: If you have triangles with different thicknesses selected, and you use the up and down buttons for the Thickness value, the triangles will be thickened or thinned relative to their current thickness.

A hollow helix being edited (note the light blue color on the outside), and shown with its cross sections. It has had a number of surface triangles deleted.