Separating by Loose Parts

Because I forgot I was making a guide, I started a different upscale in the time that passed between starting and completing this document. So we are moving to the Red Mage Level 100 Artifact Coat. If you are following along using the Ravel Keeper’s Chestpiece of Casting, the same steps will apply regardless. All upscales are approached similarly.

Video Reference

If you’re a video person or simply need some video reference, you can view a video I made covering much of this material here: Separating By Loose Parts

Step 0: If you opted to NOT join your parts together above, I suggest renaming your parts to avoid accidentally hiding or deleting critical parts of the mesh. For the Red Mage coat, I renamed my wrists to “wrist” and elbows to “elbow.” This will help me remember that those are IMPORTANT and I SHOULD NOT get rid of them or join them into what I’m working on.

Step 1: Go into edit mode on your first Part (you can do this by pressing Tab). In this example, I am opening up the Torso part of the red mage coat, which includes everything except for the elbows and wrists. Press A to Select All, and then press P, which opens up the separate menu. Select “By Loose Parts.”

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Step 2: Scream now about how many parts it is. Mine is hundreds. The picture is but one small part of the red mage coat.

HOWEVER now it is ready for you to begin working back and forth to figure out which parts you can hide or delete so that all the textures are fixed and the outfit is beautiful and facing a single direction. Don’t be scared! Many parts doesn’t mean it’s more complicated.

Why should I separate?

How to Decide what to Remove

This is kind of complicated to describe (and I would recommend a cursory glance at the video here if you read it and don’t get it!), but the easiest way to explain it is that I go through this entire, horrible list of parts and carefully begin hiding (using H) the ones that appear RED from the outside of the outfit when I have View Backfaces on, until I have only faces that point the same direction and the entire outfit is BLUE. Doing this will fix the unsightly texture issues that you saw when you first loaded in the model, as the texture mismatch and distortion is caused by overlapping backfaces.

I do this for both the parts that show up red and blue, but also the parts that show up purple and pink. Purple and pink are code in blender for two faces are pointing opposite directions. That means at least one of those needs to go - we will add them back in later!

So my PERSONAL work process is:

Picture examples:

Here I have selected this part.

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Hiding the part turns it blue. This means the part I selected is a backface.

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I will keep going, keeping the part hidden, if it is a backface. If it’s not (AKA it turns RED), OR hiding it creates some sort of hole or problem in the detailing, I will undo my hide and keep going.

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I highly recommend working slowly and carefully, and hiding parts rather than deleting them immediately. That way, if you make a mistake somewhere in the past and accidentally hide the wrong part, you do not need to figure out how many steps ago you accidentally deleted the item. This is a personal choice, however, and if you feel very confident you can delete pieces with abandon!

I don’t intend to leave any duplicated backfaces at this point. Everything is either red or blue. I’ll add in additional backfacing at the end of the ENTIRE process. For now, simple is best.

For parts where the backfaces are ‘hidden’ inside of it, such as this little hanging down part of the red mage coat, I will make a mental note of any backfaces I may need to add later to make it look beautiful on the move and go ahead and delete them. The goal is NO backfaces!

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THE ONE EXCEPTION to this is backfacing where it would create a hole or distort the mesh. For example, there is a part on the red mage coat that shows up like so:

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However, when you hide the part, it creates a hole in the mesh if you upskirt the model:

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This is why I hide things rather than delete them to begin - I actually messed this up and had to go back and turn it back on! You don’t want to leave unsightly holes if you can help it. This is something we can work around later, but the less of this you have, the better.

Joining Parts Back Together

As you go along, you’ll begin to form an idea of what items should go together in logical parts. Keeping in mind the golden rule of vanilla, that ANY MESH can be made into distinct subparts as long as you keep the original part (IE: 1.x, etc) the same for textures, you can begin to join together pieces you feel in your heart should be joined as one.

For example, in the video I show that I notice all of the actual ‘large’ pieces of the coat are purely front faces with no backfacing attached. So I begin to join those pieces together, adding in the detailing and piping I find, until I am left with something like this (remembering I do not fix my elbows and wrists in this part, but you may):

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A few rules of thumb:

At the end of the joining and hiding process, you should be left with a project that looks something like this:

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Revision #2
Created 29 August 2024 14:56:38 by khara
Updated 29 August 2024 16:44:52 by khara