New here, hope this is the proper board for this kind of question.
I'm relatively new to Blender, and I've had cases where I'd like to separate an object that's becoming a bit cumbersome to handle into separate meshes. For instance this, I made a helmet with a rim (or whatever you call the extrusion near the edges) like this:
Turns out the rims almost needed more vertices than the rest of the helmet, and handling their material etc. would be easier if they were a separate object. I tried keeping the whole thing relatively low poly and achieve the curves etc. by using subdivision surface, like so:
My question is, what's the "correct" or most common way to go about this; I could just select the faces near the edge and separate them & fill the missing faces to make them watertight, but then the subdivisions wouldn't make the helmet match the rim's lines etc. exactly anymore and there would be some ugly gaps between the two. I could approximate this by fiddling with edge creases & careful positioning of the vertices that "meet" the other object, but I'm not sure this is the way to go. Is there any way to "match" or attach vertices in an object into ones in another object, so the two would line up perfectly, while still keeping the objects themselves separate?
Or am I just doing it wrong, and keeping it as a single, bigger mesh would be preferred?
This might be a very basic thing, sorry about that - it's just something that's been bugging me and I'd like to learn the correct method instead of having to adjust something I came up with later on. Thanks in advance!