Recently I purchased a very nice female digital model online. One reason for doing so was to study the model and how it was built to perhaps learn new techniques in modeling. I was actively learning organic modeling quite a few years ago but many other interests and projects got in the way and I have since forgotten much of what I learned. The adage "use it or lose it" certainly applies to me in this instance.

One thing I wanted to do with this model was to reshape and enhance certain features of the form. When I first viewed the model in Maya (2013) I was presented with the fully rigged character with a very low resolution "base mesh" of the model. I assumed that the base mesh which was soft bound to the IK skeleton was referencing the high-resolution version of the model at render time so that when the render was complete I saw the high-res version in all her glory. What I'm very much puzzled by, though, is I cannot figure out where the high-res version of the model actually is, if that makes sense. I would like to export a .OBJ version of the "enhanced" version of the model to possibly print a 3D version via a 3D printer. But when I export the existing mesh I only get the very low-res version.

So can anyone tell me how this works? By "how this works" I mean where IS the high-res version of the model?

The outliner shows the base mesh, associated items such as eyes, teeth, shoes and other accessories, etc. along with a reference node (which, when selected, hi-lites the bound skeleton), a "humanIK1" node (which, when selected, lights up the controls for moving the IK skeleton), a "softMod1Handle" node which I don't know what it does and a "fbikCharacter" node which is a character set node.

I really appreciate your help on this.

Mike