Need advice for automating bridging process between mesh islands. I have a lot mesh islands with small holes. I need to connect them in one mesh quickly. Currently the connection process is quite tedious - by manually selecting edges and bridging them one-by-one. Seems this process can be easily speed up by automatically selecting vertices that “near enough but belongs to different non-connected mesh islands”. Look at screenshot for better description. May be there is a script or addon for this kind of tasks… any advise welcome, thanks in advance!
It`s a pity that kind of holes are not possible to detect with “Clean up->Fill holes”, operation seems to be very similar to “Remove doubles” but with filling instead of merging //
How this is done sometimes depends on the nature of what’s being bridged:
In an ideal situation, selecting both sets of edges and bridging works. Sometimes a little poking on the operation settings to twist. And for edge selection, it’s either alt-selecting (loop) or control-selecting (shortest path).
Next best is bridging the gaps at the end, and then using grid fill. Doesn’t always work, but it gives nice results when it does.
After that, I tend to use a feature from the F2 add on. (Might be in default Blender now, but anyways…) It lets you repeatedly fill in by hitting F with an edge or vertex selected. Then you zip up an area more quickly while manually making edits to even things out.
Also sometimes If there’s a concave open edge (C shaped area) I’m trying to fill in, I’ll just select the shortest path along it and fill in with an N-gon to triangulate or manually rework later.
That is the question, this is a lot of manual work, indeed.
May be there is addon/script that can auto-select closest vertices in different mesh islands?
