Splitting into Parts
You may have noticed that the model wasn't initially joined together, but split into many different parts. Why?
When a character wears long gloves for example what happens is that the chestpiece model discards the wrist and elbow parts and shrinks down the remaining stump a little to better fit into a glove.
So if you want to preserve this functionality you will have to separate your model again in a similar way.
But first duplicate your joined object, we may need it later.
Then to separate go to Edit Mode and select the polygons you need and press Mesh > Separate > Selection (Hotkey: P)
Pic. Split Upper Body
Pic. Split Legs
Ok, splitting was easy, but here's the annoying part. If you remember vertex normals from the clean-up chapter, it's them again.
When you join and merge vertices of body parts the shading along the seams is smooth, but when you separate them into different parts, blender hardens the open seam edges.
Blender doesn't allow directly editing the vertex normals, so what you have to do is transfer them, either from a donor duplicate object where the the seams are merged or from neighboring body part, preferably the former.
But first we need to mark the area that we will transfer to:
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Select the body part seam edge.
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Add new empty vertex group, rename it to something like SeamEdge.
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Press Assign with Weight value of 1.0.
Vertex Group are used for more than just designating bone influence -
Add a new DataTransfer modifier in the Modifiers tab
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Set Source Object to either joined donor object or next body part
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Set Vertex Group to the one you just created
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Turn on Face Corner Data and Custom Normals
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Select Mapping method, not sure which one is best but Nearest Face works.
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Done, now do it for all other body parts
