While teaching myself Blender, I had the brilliant idea to take a print model and retopography it for animation. This has turned out to be much more difficult than I thought it would be, and here is one of the problems: because limbs are pressed into each other and not full formed, I have to tear them apart and sculpt the missing pieces myself. Before I can start sculpting on them, it looks like I’ll have to fill in the holes I’ve created. Before I can do that, I need to figure out a way to select the edges of a high poly mesh. The problem with that is edge loop select is completely worthless. When I use it, I get roughly 3 edges of god knows how many I need to select. When I take the time to manually select a few edges and try grid fill, Blender just laughs at me. Regular fill works, but then I can’t sculpt because it’s only one face. Subdivide doesn’t seem to work.
Here’s an example of an arm that was pressed against the body, which I detached and now has a large hole in it. What the quickest, least frustrating way to fill in this hole so I can sculpt it out so I can retopography for animation?
Select one of the edges on the end there and do an Select > Select Loops > Edge Loop.
Next Alt+F for a regular fill. Doing a grid fill I find works with good geometry and regular fill works with bad geometry. After that Dynatopo can be done to add some more tris to the fill.
If you have another thing with a ton of holes or too high a density mesh MeshLab could be the answer.
I used edge loop selection on the image below. Do you see it? That’s half the problem I’m having. As far as MeshLab, I downloaded it and took a quick look. The decimation I’ve tried on it so far isn’t that much better than Blender’s. Is there a particular operation I should be looking for?
Watercycles gave me the idea for the solution. First, I installed the free instant mesh addon to decimate and clean up the mesh. This made it a lot easier to select edges. Then I used Fill because I didn’t want the closed loop necessary to do a grid fill. Finally, I used triangulate faces, knife tool, and subdivide to give myself more polys. Then I was able to sculpt as normal. Now I can retopologize. If I want to add more detail later, I can subidivide my new mesh and shrinkwrap it to the original highpoly model. Should be close enough to not mess up my flow. Thanks to everybody for their help.
