Alright, let me tell you about what I worked on today. It was one of those things, you know? Had this character model, let’s call her Homa, that I needed for a little project. The catch? She had this hat, and I really needed her without it.
Getting Started – The Hat Problem
So, first thing, fired up my trusty old 3D software. Max, you know the one. Loaded up the Homa model I had. Looked pretty good, but that hat… it was right there, front and center. My initial thought, maybe it’s easy? Maybe just a separate piece I can click and delete?
Nope. No such luck. It looked like the hat was actually part of the main head mesh. Not just attached, but properly merged in. That always makes things a bit more fiddly. You can’t just hit delete without leaving a big hole or messing up the geometry underneath.
Tackling the Mesh
Okay, plan B. Had to dive into polygon editing mode. Started selecting the faces that made up the hat. This took a while, gotta be careful not to grab bits of the hair or the head itself. Zooming in, rotating the view a million times. Standard stuff when you’re doing this kind of surgery.
Once I thought I had all the hat polygons selected, I took a deep breath and hit delete. And yeah, like I expected, there was a gap. But worse, the areas where the hat joined the hair were a mess. Some vertices were shared, so deleting the hat polys ripped holes in the hair too.
- Selected hat polygons.
- Deleted them.
- Big hole appeared.
- Edges where hat met hair were jagged and broken.
Patching Things Up
So, the next hour or so was spent fixing that hole. This is where the real work started. I had to basically rebuild the top of the head and hair where the hat used to be.
I started selecting the border edges around the hole. Used tools to cap the hole, but the topology was all wrong, looked terrible. Ended up doing it more manually. Bridging edges across the gap, adding new polygons one by one to fill it in. Trying to follow the flow of the existing hair strands as best I could. Welded vertices that were close together to clean it up. It wasn’t perfect, mind you. Getting hair geometry right is always tough.
Then came the smoothing. Applied some smoothing groups, tweaked vertices here and there to make it look less… well, less like someone hacked a hat off with a blunt axe. Had to check the textures too. Sometimes removing geometry messes up the UV coordinates. Luckily, it wasn’t too bad this time, mostly the texture underneath was okay, just needed minor touch-ups where the new polygons were.
The Result – No Hat Homa
Finally, after a fair bit of fiddling, I got there. Homa, sans hat. Does it look like a factory-perfect model? Maybe not if you zoom right in. There are probably a few dodgy polygons if you look hard enough. But from a normal distance? For what I need it for? Yeah, it works. She looks like herself, just without the headwear.
It’s always satisfying when you manage to wrestle a model into doing what you want. Took longer than I hoped, but that’s often the way, isn’t it? Anyway, job done for today. Got my ‘max homa no hat’ sorted.
