How do I seamlessly blend 2 separate pieces of geo without merging them into one piece?

[keejin]

I work with a company that has a few contract modelers in a different country. Sometimes I will receive files from one of the artists and he does this trick with his sculpts that I can’t figure out. He can blend 2 separate pieces of geometry seamlessly into what looks like one piece of mesh.

Here’s what I mean:

I can only assume he projects one of the pieces onto the other, or he’s using the slice tool in some weird way that I’m somehow failing to replicate? It’s not like the world’s going to end or my boss wants me to do it like this specifically, but I’m just curios to know for myself since it could prove to be useful in other projects in the future.

I can’t ask him directly because he’s from a different country and I don’t know how to word my question, and even if I did all the terms would be different from the program language difference. I can’t ask my boss to be an interpreter either since he has 0 knowledge on anything 3D modeling related, and he’s not exactly the most voluntarily helpful person.

I’ve searched for a lot of tutorials on how to do this but it’s mostly all just dynamesh, weld points, or insert mesh where people are just adamant about making it into one piece, which is not what I’m looking for. Anyways, any suggestions or help would be amazing!

[Spyndel]

Hello @keejin ,

I’m actually not completely sure what I’m seeing here. However, based on your bottom-most screenshot it does appear that these are separate closed volumes that partially overlap with the surface of your other mesh.

While I would point out this is likely to be problematic in certain scenarios-- overlapping surfaces active at the same time will at the very least confuse, if not prove detrimental to other processes–there are quite a few ways this could have happened. Off the top of my head:

1. Detail projection, as you have already mentioned.

2. Duplicating the mesh subtool, and cutting up the duplicate into smaller volumes-- for instance with the Dynamesh feature with “Groups” active, or any other feature in ZBrush that cuts or re-shapes a mesh.

3. Use of surface-conforming brushes like ZProject or Matchmaker.