...rigging confusion....in modelling

[Dustin]

Either way has it's benefits and disadvantages. I think the biggest thing you need to decide is, are the seams going to be visible where the hands and neck are cut apart. if so, you will see the crease in a render.

If they are not seen, then either way will work fine.

[virtualmesh]

Speed up the process and don't bother fine-tune modeling the entire body. Instead just spend most of your time modeling your character's clothes and then skin (max) the clothes to an underlying bone skeleton. Of course if your character has exposed skin then spend the time to model those parts too...but for those vertices that are not going to be in frame at render time, don't spend any time with them in your rig unless your animation rig is going to incorporate (and depend on) collision detecting. If this is the case then you don't need to spend as much time fine-tuning hi-res details with the body's vertices under the clothing (as opposed to any visable vertices that are in view to the camera during render).

If you don't need collission detection then I would weld the seams where your character's clothes meet up with your character's underlying exposed skin. It's best to keep your character's mesh as one solid object rather than multiple separate objects (unless you are going to use the individual body parts as a driving object for more advanced skin modifiers. Before you skin your character's vertices to the bones underneath, run a utility to check if there are any holes within your mesh before you begin to skin (max) it to the underlying bones. If there are holes then fill them up before skinning.

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