I made all of the body plates on this wasp model separate objects. Also, the head and leg parts are separate objects. I need some guidance on how I should join them together for skinning and animation. The main goal for the thorax (chest area) will be for UV mapping as the plates won’t move much, if at all. So animating the skin-like filling won’t be important except around the wing area. I made it so the ball connected to the wing will rotate on its axis.
Should I use the “Solidify” modifier on the plates to give them all depth and then extrude the head into an interior glob shaped object that is meant to look plyable like human skin so the head rotation will look realistic?
Maybe just make all the plates the same object? This would probably be difficult to join all the quads with nice topology.
This is my first one; should I have started this out a different way?
Do you really think it is necessary. I believe it is not. If you keep your model separated it wont affect your animation because the wasp has no muscles to animate from the start.
I would solidify the plates so the seams tighten up and no light will shine through the body. Then, join them all together with [ctrl+j] making sure that your modifiers are either applied or exactly the same in all your objects. I would then extrude out a “neck” area to connect the head. It’s not necessary for the mesh to be all connected unless you’re trying to 3D print the model. It’s actually easier to keep the geometry separate in the object for UV unwrapping.
