How to fill a hole of a closed ribbon without loosing shape?

[AlexxCentral]

Hello everybody,

I have a closed ribbon (imagine like the borders of a country on a map). I want to preserve the exact shape these borders.

But when I use “Fill Holes” the shape gets destroyed.
When I fill that Hole before in Maya, then zBrush can’t use it (because its a face with more than 4 edges).

It would be even more great, if I could keep that ribbon as a polygroup, because I originally wanted to extrude the borders.

Any idea how to solve this?
(The snapshots show of course different examples, but with the same task.)
Many thanks…

[marcus_civis]

I don’t know of a way to avoid it but the closed holes areas are a new polygroup so it’s not difficult to isolate the bits you don’t want and then hide>delete hidden.

Attachments

[Cryrid]

In Maya there should be a way to target and triangulate all n-gons to make it work in Zbrush.

As for Zbrush, I’d suggest switching to the zmodeler brush and trying out is Close (Edge) action. The default Concave Hole target tends to do a good job with complex holes. Otherwise use the Bridge action to manually bridge the ribbon in a few areas so that you’re left with a few simpler holes to close, rather than a giant complex one one.

[AlexxCentral]

Thanks for the suggestions!

Especially the idea to triangulate in Maya to preserve the outer Shape sounds easy to solve for the next time.
(sometimes I miss the forest for the trees)