Now that we have a mesh, the next step would be to clean it up. Since my workflow involves a poly modeler, I would do the cleanup there. If you wanted to go straight to ZBrush and then to something like an STL output for manufacture, you’d probably be meshing things very differently. I’d suggest changing the method to Quads and Triangles, turn on Weld vertices, and just crank the slider all the way up. ZBrush won’t have issue with the density and you can sculpt away. My goals aren’t that, so I have to think about how I’m going to make a very efficient item out of this down the line.
Now, much of the work from here is very polygon modeling oriented. It takes skill in that mindset to do all of this, but there is a lot of rather automatic stuff to do. So I’ll cover that, which will also serve as a kind of feature request to Michael. ^_~
The first thing I do is look over the model for specific things: planer caps, T-Junctions, and poly lines on surface edges that are close but not quite on top of each other. Depending upon how messy the surface edges are depends upon when I weld edges. Areas that are good I weld up. Other parts I work out before welding. Sometimes I just go back to MoI and export problem sections again at different settings.
Planer caps are easy; there’s ways in MoI to force them how you want (I’ll get to that later), but if they’re simple, you can do them inside of the poly modeler without much hassle. Delete the faces, and if you have something like the outer part of this, you can just bridge and it works. The inside one is harder to do just right. You can edge slice in the ones you want. Or you can delete the cap, scale in the edge, then collapse the inner verts to a single point. Or you can be lazy like me and use a script that does a poly fan for you.
The next thing I look for is T-junctions and excessive vertexes. T-junctions are especially annoying; at best it’s just extra edges and at worst it causes the bordering polygons to become non-planer. Overall, I find that it’s best just to remove them. Sometimes, though, I’ll actually flow it through the object; those are only when I need the poly flow in another part, though (like linking up two surfaces). Also something to keep a lookout for is verts in the middle of edges that nothing else connects into; these two-edge verts are pointless and need to be removed. I have a script I use for that, but otherwise they’re really hard to spot.
After that, the effort really is down to seeing which edge should flow into another. This is the part that’s pretty much polygon modeling and I’m not going to cover it. Suffice to say that my choice to make this one mesh on output made it tougher to clean up. And the output isn’t perfect, but it subdivides just fine, holds the right shape in all the right place, and can be sculpted without much fuss.