Welded hands from figure need help fixing

[RAMWolff]

Hi,

I’m designing a Catsuit for a 3D rigged figure. I have permission to use her body parts to create the suit. I had a Catsuit I did a while back as the base. Comes with built in gloves.

Issue I was having after rigging the suit were the hands and gloves. I know, gloves are a pain in the ass to rig and have work as expected. This is harder than I’ve ever had to deal with so my next try was to cut off her hands and weld them to the catsuit. Issue with that is that the catsuit and her hands are not equal poly’s to line up correctly so I did my limited best to make that work using the ZModeler.

So I’d like the flow to be nicer if possible or at least learn a way to clean up the stitching and bridging I did. Not pretty in some areas. I know folks would tell me just ZRemesh the whole thing. Issue is in order for the rigging to work correctly the hands can not be remeshed, they MUST remain as they are or this attempt will fail too, this is like my 10th time at this. I’m not giving up yet and this idea seems the right path but I’m limited in my modeling skills to the point where I don’t know what else to do to get this looking better.

See the screen grab below.

Thanks for the help, I so appreciate it

Richard

[Spyndel]

@RAMWolff

I know folks would tell me just ZRemesh the whole thing

I wouldn’t. Your situation is beyond a simple ZRemesh at this point. ZRemeshing by itself is often not enough to create animation quality topology. Animation requires deliberate and highly efficient topology, and is not something you can throw together haphazardly as an afterthought, as you are discovering now. Some degree of manual retopologizing, in Zbrush or otherwise, is often required for animation quality meshes.

My best recommendation would be to manually retopologize most of the mesh by hand at this point, to match the topology of the hand since that must be preserved. This will produce the best results for animation.

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It’s a matter of points mismatch. Your body mesh is higher res and has more of them, the hand is lower rez and has fewer. This is a recipe for seams, triangles, and poles. If you can’t live with the topology there, all you can really do is try to control where that poor topology occurs–maybe tuck it out of the way some place where it’s less visible.

You need to eliminate about half of the edges running lengthwise down the arm, one way or the other. This would allow the arm to connect with the hand more naturally. But unless you rewire the entire mesh, you’re probably going to have to place a bunch of ugly topology someplace. With effort, you may be able to move it further up the arm and locate it in the armpit or some other low scrutiny area.

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As a faster but lower quality approach, you could try to ZRemesh the body to fit with the hand better. Try to include either the first or first two polyloops of the current hand polygroup in the portion of mesh to be remeshed if that is at all possible. The farther you can go down the hand, the more triangles it will eliminate.

To do this you will need to hide those portions of the hand that need to be preserved, and enable “Freeze Border” in ZRemesher. ZRemesher will remesh the body, and try to preserve the vertex count and placement along the open border where it joins the hand.

This may or may not improve the topology. You may have even more cleanup work to do. But ZRemesher may be able to reduce the polycount of the body to allow the hands to match up better with fewer extraneous loops that need to be tied off.

[RAMWolff]

Very interesting approach. So HIDE the hand polys (esp the fingers and knuckle areas as those are the pieces to my puzzle that must remain in tact) and then as you mentioned Freeze Border and give that a try? OK. I’ll give that a go!

There’s always Ctrl Z if it doesn’t work out.

Thanks so much!

Richard

[RAMWolff]

It wasn’t the perfect solution and you did mention “clean up” YUP, allot of that but it worked out pretty well. Thanks for the help!