Homogenizing Surfaces

ghastlycomic

I'm working on a skull cap where basically I've started with cutting the top off a basic genesis figure. It's surfaces are divided into 2_SkinHead and 1_Skinface. How do I homogenize these two seperate shading surfaces into one?

Richard Haseltine

Tiresome details first - chopping a bit off Genesis to make something for use in your own renders is fine, but you may not share the resulting model with others (renders are fine).

Now, there are two parts to the answer. The easy bit, which you can do in DS if you want using the Polygon Selection Tool, is to select all parts of the skullcap and assign them to a single new material (which should have a unique name, so that you can have both the cap and the figure selected when applying material presets without changing something you didn't want changed). Unfortunately the fact that the materials start with different names means they use different texture maps - they may overlap, which could be a problem, and they will certainly be using only a limited portion of the available space on the images, which means you have to choose between low-resolution textures on the model or a lot of wasted memory loading the blank areas of an image large enough to give decent resolution. To fix those issues you really need to redo the UV mapping of the model, which requires using Blender or hexagon or the like - though with luck a simple planar projection along the Y-axis, and then perhaps a bit of relaxation, should do the job here.

ghastlycomic

Thanks! I just realized that ultimately it doesn't really matter because it's all going to be deleted when all things are said and done. I just cut the top off the head along the hairline to use as a reference when making hair models. Once the hair is in place then the reference will be deleted anyway so it won't matter that it's two separate surfaces. Everything but unassigned faces will be gone anyways. But it's good to know how to do it none-the-less. Thanks.