Hello guys, this is something I have been wondering about lately. I am not that experienced yet, so that might be the problem, but when I have problems deciding whether to add a new mesh or continue extruding the current one. How do you guys decide this ? Do you get the feeling for this as you become more experienced ? Because sometimes, when modelign a character for example, I do everything from one mesh, but then when adding the hands or feet, I suddenly end up with too many unnecessary loop cuts, but if I was to add the hand mesh to the character mesh, there would be too many loop cuts on the hand, if you know what I mean.
A lot of this also comes down to texturing. Bceause you can texture by selecting and faces and apllying the material, or uv unwrapping. If I was to create a new mesh everytime, would not that be easier because I there would not be the need to create complicated texutres ?
i know this question might seem complicated, but Iwill apprectiate every answer. Thx
When joining meshes one thing to keep in mind is the number of verticies that you will be joining to. You want to try to keep them the same count as the one you are joining to. For instance joining a sphere to a cylinder at the top you would say have 16 segments for both, that way when you go to join it to the top you have the same number of sections to join the top of the cylinder to the bottom of the sphere. So generally when doing a character you try to keep the initial mesh lower poly so that the loop cuts do not hinder the full body modeling. Then once the base mesh is done then you can go in and add in edge flow as needed for details. Or even just create a base mesh then sculpt the rest, then retopologize over the high poly sculpt mesh. As far as texturing goes as long as you mark the seams correctly it doesn’t really affect much on the retopologized mesh.
So in short it is more of a planning phase of figuring out what is needed in the base mesh before adding in the details. When hard surface modeling sometimes it works out better to have individual meshes/objects to create the complete object such as guns and mechanical parts like a gear on a shaft you would have two separate objects the gear and the shaft not joined. Learning good edge flow and loops is a bit of a learning curve but after doing it for a while you start to see problems before the happen and compensate for them. Start with simpler meshes then work into more complicated ones as you become more proficient.
