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

Ralf_Reddings · Sep 23 2025

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 · Sep 23 2025

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

Benjammin · Sep 23 2025

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 · Sep 24 2025

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 · 3:58PM

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.

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

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