Help please! I’ve got a sculpt I really dig, and while the body still needs work, the head is just about where I want it, minus the ears.
I modeled the ears separately and am having some trouble joining them with the head; while a boolean join technically works, Blender has difficulty reading the edges when I try to smooth things over in sculpt mode. I feel like this is a fairly basic problem but I’m having trouble finding any documentation on alternate methods of joining meshes. Any ideas? Thanks! <3
As far as I know you need to have a single mesh without any extra vertices and / or holes in the mesh if you want to continue sculpting (with the merged meshes). This is something I have struggled with as well unfortunately.
I think the two solutions to do this would be either model the ears by using the sculpt tools like snake hook etc. to generate the ear “stub” from the skull and continue from there or by using multiresolution sculpting rather than dynamic topology. The latter makes it possible to join the base resolution mesh (which has fewer edges / verts) to the skull from which the ears could be separated from. (This is hard to explain it seems)
So, lets say you have a skull done in multiresolution and the lowest level is a rough rounded cube with some loop cuts and basic geometry. You could select ear stub, say a square, or a rounded circle, what ever verts you have in the skull, then duplicate that selection and then model the ear from that base selection. While using the multiresolution you have a possibility to go very detailed but also you can join the ear mesh back to skull mesh from the base resolution which shares the same base geometry at the ear base.
If you don’t want to go back and redo your ears (or you have used dynamic topology and using multiresolution would not be an option in that case) you need to merge the ear mesh for every single vertex back to the skull and leave no holes or extra vertexes.
One tip to make the merge a bit easier: Try selecting the overlapping vertexes (from ear base and skull where ear is attached to the skull) and for the selected vertexes use remove doubles with pretty high merge distance. This merges only selected vertexes and should not touch other geometry. You might need to do some clean up but should still save you a lot of time.
Unfortunately I don’t have a magic wand for this, and if you find a better solution, please, do share since I would like to learn as well.
I have also struggled with joining the ears with the body this is because the origin changes after joining and also creates some rotation wich disables mirror lock in sculpting mode i dont know if this is exactly what you are looking for but it might be worth giving this a read see if you can find your solution there.
Hey y’all! Thank you so much for all of your insanely helpful feedback!
I’ve been trying a bunch of the stuff you’ve suggested (as well as some of my own ideas) and I finally came to a result that I’m pretty happy with, though the solution itself was NOT that pretty.
So I eventually realized that the botched, artifacty sculpting was being caused by two things: since the ears still had faces on the base, those faces would still be included in the boolean join within the ear itself. The sculpt tool kept trying to prioritize the faces within the ear instead of the external faces, resulting in a confused, jaggedy mess. I also hadn’t deleted the faces within the ear-hole, which seemed to further agitate the problem. Here was my caveman-level primitive solution:
I’m a stubborn jackanape and I really liked the ears I had already built, so I came at it with a new strategy. I carved up my rabbits ear sockets and essentially created an edge-loop for each earhole.
I then did some major editing to the ears; some of the bits were going inside of each other around the base fold, so I merged those and made things much cleaner. Then, instead of performing another boolean join, I deleted the extraneous mesh that would have wound up inside the rabbit and created another edge-loop with proportional editing.
After that, I turned on dynamic topography back in sculpt mode to add some more geometry around the ears and smoothed things down to where I had initially wanted them. While I love the end result, I’m not sure I’d EVER want to go through all that hassle again. XD
Thank you all again for your great suggestions; they were all immensely helpful in helping me reach this final solution. Did this method make any sense, or did I miss something totally obvious in the process?
Thanks so much, Nicholas! Don’t get disheartened about other’s work, though; we all come from very different backgrounds with the program! I taught myself some Blender when I was very young, so while my knowledge is quite outdated, I do have quite a bit of experience with the program.
Also, I think your rabbit looks great! Reminds me of a chocolate easter bunny.
