Splitting meshes in Blender

Overview

You may need to split a mesh into several meshes in Blender. This mini guide will tell you how to do it.

This tutorial assumes that you have a basic knowledge of Blender. If that is not the case I recommend you to read and practice with these tutorials Blender 3D: Noob to Pro

Required tools

• Blender

Splitting meshes in Blender

Original mesh

Splitting the mesh

You have a mesh like the one shown in picture Original mesh and you want to split it into different meshes, for example: the dress, the body, the underwear and the sandals. To do that:

• enter Edit mode
• Press the P key
• A window like the one shown in picture Splitting the mesh will pop up. In this window you can select the method for splitting the mesh into different objects:
  • Selected: This option will take the vertices/faces selected in your mesh an move them to a new object. In the example picture, using this option the dress will be move to a new object and the rest of the parts of the mesh (body, underwear and sandals) will remain being part of the original object.
  • All Loose Parts: Using this option it doesn't matter whether you have selected some vertices/faces of the mesh. This will separate the mesh taking into account what parts of it are not connected to other parts of the mesh. For example, using this option each of the sandals will be separated into different objects as they are not connected between them. This is useful if your original mesh has parts that are not connected to the rest of the mesh.
  • By Material: Using this option the mesh will be splitting into as many parts as materials are used by the mesh. For example, if your mesh uses a material for the body and another material for the dress, sandals and underwear, using this option your mesh will be splitting in two, separating the body from the rest of the mesh.
• Once Blender has finished splitting the mesh, go to Object mode and click on the different parts of the original mesh. You'll see that now you have more than one object: one will keep the original name of the mesh (Dress in the example) and the other will have a number added after that name (Dress.001, Dress.002, ...)