I am creating a spider and currently have the legs, eyes, and body as separate entities under one object. I am working on my final sculpting (using multiresolution), and want to sculpt the legs and the body together so that they look like one part. Here’s an image of what I have of the body and leg.
Booleans probably won’t work well with multiresolution sculpting. They’re fine with dynamic topology, but since multires uses an underlying low-poly mesh, the boolean modifier would likely destroy the multires data. If you wanted to merge two objects together via sculpting, multires was the wrong choice. Unless you feel adventurous and you want to apply the modifier and retopologize later…
OK, so for future reference, what would be a good way to go about doing the final fine detail assuming I was to start fresh? To me, it seems unlikely that no one has run across my problem before, so I just assumed it was possible. Would it help if I separated the items into their own object?
I tried the boolean modifier and it didn’t work. I separated out one leg to try. I tried it both with the leg as the target object and also with the body as the target object. It either removed the body, legs, and eyes, or the body and half the eyes. Though, the modifier was also below the multirez. It wouldn’t allow me to move it above it and I can’t delete the multirez as this will delete all the work I’ve done so far.
If it’s supposed to be a game character, then you’ll retopo anyway, and this mesh will be used only for baking normals, so u don’t have to worry. Even if not, try applying materials/texturing, these cavities are too obvious in solid mode, but texture would probably blend them away, especially if you want a dark-to-black color scheme.
I would just say that you should always plan ahead. If you’re trying to model something that should look continuous with no break, don’t model it as a discontinuous broken-up mesh. If it’s supposed to look like one piece, don’t make it out of two.
I tried the boolean modifier and it didn’t work. I separated out one leg to try. I tried it both with the leg as the target object and also with the body as the target object. It either removed the body, legs, and eyes, or the body and half the eyes. Though, the modifier was also below the multirez. It wouldn’t allow me to move it above it and I can’t delete the multirez as this will delete all the work I’ve done so far.
You could apply the multiresolution modifier on all objects that you want to join. then add a boolean modifier to the body. in the Boolean Modifier you should set the Operation “Union” and as object you take one of the legs (this way it duplicates the selected leg and joins it to the body with connected transition where both objects meet each other). It may take a while, because i guess it’s pretty high poly. it is even possible that blender crashes or you run out of memory, but you can atleast try it.
This way you loose the ability to use the multires modifer (because you have to accept it) but you wont loose all of your sculpting work.
EDIT
I made a simple test where i joined 2 highpoly meshes.
With about 1 Million Poly (Triangle Faces, Tris) in the Scene, it took me about 30 seconds to apply a boolean modifier.
With 3 Million Poly about 2 Minutes
With 5 Million Poly about 5 Minutes.
I have 8 GB of RAM and use the 64 Bit version of blender. Your PC Spec are diffrent so it could be faster or slower the important part is the RAM. I think it may crash when you are above 2 Million Poly and you use 32 Bit system and blender version. just something i want to note :-).
You can’t boolean multires meshes together. Well, you can, but you won’t get any kind of predictable result. You have two options at this point. One is to retopo the whole spider as one mesh and project the new mesh onto the old one (using the shrinkwrap modifier). The other solution is to apply the multires on all pieces and only then boolean them together - but you’ll have to sculpt using dyntopo from this point forward. I recommend the former solution.
Thanks for the advice. Its a bummer that there is no good way to go about doing it. In my model, I only have 426k tris (213k vertices) with the multires modifier active, subdivided 3x (I think that would be considered low poly?). I think what I will end up doing will be to go into edit mode and join vertices together. There really isn’t that many and i will only have to add a couple of edge loops.
Any changes you make to the base mesh at this point will destroy your sculpt data. That’s why I said you should have planned this out before sculpting. There is no way to maintain multires sculpt data and change the underlying mesh. You must either accept it as it is, or start your sculpt pretty much from scratch after you change your mesh.
I had already started making my changes to the base mesh before your last post, so i went ahead and finished anyways. It really didn’t damage the sculpt data very much. Could be because I only changed a few vertices? Here is a picture of it updated. I think it looks much better already.
