What are your go to workflows for fixing pinches and general iregularities on a form?

Ralf_Reddings

This something I am running into very often; model the general overall form and then lets say, insert a circular hole or some small detail into it, this is trivial to do so, howerver, often as a by product, pinching gets introduced or some surface irregularity.

I have been plagued by this, unfortunately, I am short on methods that I can fall back on that will help me to routinely solve this common issue.

I have searched fairly and have not come across anything concrete. I even asked several AI models that general have good poly modelling answers. Deepseek says;

Method 2: The "Sculpting with a Mask" (Surgical Precision) This method is perfect for protecting specific areas you don't want to change at all.

• Freeze the Good Parts:
• Select the vertices of the circular hole and any other areas you want to keep perfectly preserved.
• With the Relax Brush active, go to its Tool Settings. In the Selection section, click the Freeze button. The frozen vertices will turn a different color (often blue). The brush will now have zero effect on them.
• Relax the Unfrozen Area
• Now you can aggressively use the Relax brush on the pinched area without any fear of distorting your perfect circular hole or other important features.

I tried the above solution and its not a good solution, all it does is it takes the uneven surface and flattens it to an even plane (red colour=frozen verts). So if the pinch was on sphere, this would not work.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Eric Chadwick

I just edit the affected vertices, manually. Much faster than messing around with all kinds of tools.

Benjammin

For low poly stuff, manual vertex editing and often editing their normal vectors directly for troublemakers. For high poly hard surface stuff in Zbrush I tend to do it with booleans and dynamesh to avoid topology issues entirely.

thomasp

What software and modelling methods are we talking? For Sub-D/poly-modelling I would normally use the relax function on a vertex selection and constrain it to the surface. Sometimes it's necessary to insert extra geometry to 'stabilize' the shading. For low poly modelling there's also the option of duplicating the mesh, uprezzing that, doing a clean job with Sub-D modelling or even sculpting brushes on the duplicate and then stealing the vertex normals from it for the low poly. 

That's more of a final step in most applications though since these vertex normals break easily when you keep editing the mesh. Also easy to break when exporting to another software.

While sculpting in Zbrush: smooth brush (shift key) and a combination of flatten and polish (?) brushes should do the job and massage the offending areas - best done on the lower subdivision levels and gradually stepping it up. Sorry been so long I don't remember exactly what the brushes were called. There are too many really similarly behaving ones at any rate.

aumramaram

Generally what you want to do is not solve those problems, but avoid them. By blocking out your model properly before moving to the detail stage you will know ahead of time how objects intersect and thus be able to give each part the right angle and topology to support later boolean operations. If you don't plan this out ahead of time you end up having to fix a lot of issues.

Ralf_Reddings

Eric Chadwick said:

I just edit the affected vertices, manually. Much faster than messing around with all kinds of tools.

I gave this try i did not manage it all the way, but it was promissing for sure, thanks.

Ralf_Reddings

thomasp said:

What software and modelling methods are we talking? 

This was a very helpful answer, thank you very much for taking the time to share this. Maya (2026). poly modelling with the end goal of ending up with sub-division ready model, so am working with maya's smooth preview to constantly preview the sub-divided model

For Sub-D/poly-modelling I would normally use the relax function on a vertex selection and constrain it to the surface.

I was going through Mayas poly sculpting tools, which these relax functions you mention but it did not give me a easy way to main the form, this "constrain" feature you mention is the critical factor I overlooked and sure enough mayas sculpting tools do have it, I just overlooked, I will be sure to give them a try now.

Sometimes it's necessary to insert extra geometry to 'stabilize' the shading.

This is something I picked up just recently from watching an instructor that I liked, good to see it how it would also help.

For low poly modelling there's also the option of duplicating the mesh, uprezzing that, doing a clean job with Sub-D modelling or even sculpting brushes on the duplicate and then stealing the vertex normals from it for the low poly. 

This sounds very interesting. I think I understand most of what you say, so when I have the temporary (duplicate) mesh down to how I would like it to look, I then copy its vertex normals for the part of my actual (low poly) model? Do vertex normals actually effect a objects actual geometry? I thought it was just a visual shading effect and it has no bearing on geometry's component positions. Do you think you could point to a youtube video of someone's example? I sure would like to see it in practice.

I will keep that normal idea in mind, am sure I will make sense of it as I practice and watch others. Thanks for this.

aumramaram said:

Generally what you want to do is not solve those problems, but avoid them. By blocking out your model properly before moving to the detail stage you will know ahead of time how objects intersect and thus be able to give each part the right angle and topology to support later boolean operations. If you don't plan this out ahead of time you end up having to fix a lot of issues.

I had not though of it this way, I will keep this, its hard (I guess for a beginer like me) to eye ball this from the start but I am sure I will develp the eye. Thank you.

thomasp

Ralf_Reddings said:

I was going through Mayas poly sculpting tools, which these relax functions you mention but it did not give me a easy way to main the form, this "constrain" feature you mention is the critical factor I overlooked and sure enough mayas sculpting tools do have it, I just overlooked, I will be sure to give them a try now.

Yeah there's the sculpting tool and also another one that is part of the poly modelling toolset. In Maya it's called the Edit Mesh : Average Vertices tool.

This sounds very interesting. I think I understand most of what you say, so when I have the temporary (duplicate) mesh down to how I would like it to look, I then copy its vertex normals for the part of my actual (low poly) model? Do vertex normals actually effect a objects actual geometry? I thought it was just a visual shading effect and it has no bearing on geometry's component positions. Do you think you could point to a youtube video of someone's example? I sure would like to see it in practice.

Yeah that's what I was thinking: manipulate the shading after you are happy with the geometry as such but perhaps still need to get rid of little visual glitches. I can probably dig out some example but in any case in Maya the tool to use is Mesh : Transfer Attributes and then pick the vertex normal option.

iam717

Helpful posts ladies & gents:

Yea if its hard-edges situations and hole punching and pitch relaxing, i like to find anything that would conform the shape back to its previous state of flat or smoothed, so relax tools (soft smoothing) & a lot of moving the verticies along the edges and pulling it back in place sounds like this would help more than anything else, but yeah, yesterday on a cylinder i had to fix something i didn't notice cause i was using an app i do not use often.  

Finding the move along verticies path edge was helpful, i do not use MAYA but i am sure they have something to move verts along the edges path and usually that will conform the shapes back together.  Also going to simplest forms even if you have to redo things would be the better option probably.

tldr;

So remove the offending piece as a "patch idea", fix the issues outside of the whole mesh and put it back in place and connected after the fixes.  Or even better doing the same patch thing and redoing it as you wanted.  

Unfortunately unless you planned ahead of time (already mentioned) with something like what zbrush has with the "eraser technique" being used across all applications a project is being utilized in, we are all s.o.o.l. (s#it out of luck) and manually is the go to to save time &  life.