Merging Edges
In this image I’ve merged the head to the main body and here’s a close up of the area that was merged…
The area in blue highlights where the two components were merged. Note that the geometry has not been cleaned, this is a quick merge so that it is easier to visualize the form of the character as a single mesh. The mesh’s topology (the flow of continuous and unbroken lines/edges that form the underlying structure used to calculate the objects deformations) will be cleaned up at a later stage, once I’m happy with the characters general form.
You might also be interested to note the area in the center of the joined pieces where the adam’s apple of the neck and the sternum of the chest lead into each other. In this model there is atleast twice the amount of geometry leading from the sternum of the makeHuman model into the adam’s apple of the cow’s head.
A technique that I often use to reduce the amount of loop cuts needed to join meshes and also prevent creating excessive triangulated polygons is to form C-shaped loops in those areas which (are infact oval shaped loops when the model is merged). This means a reduction of the amount of faces coming in from the higher resolution mesh to the lower resolution mesh by half, as the C-shape of the loop can be used to encompass a row of faces inside it, that would have otherwise resulted in twice the amount of non-manifold edges.
… The following image skips ahead in the progression of images substantially, to demonstrate the
effectiveness of this technique once the geometry was cleaned up. It’s worth noting that the face count
was not increased substantially, nor does the join incorporate triangular polys and the topology of the
mesh flows to create natural edges for deformation.
Here’s a screenshot of what the character looks like as a singular mesh with minimal modifications to the
general form, mainly to scale components to match each others proportions.
