Background / Overview

I primarily use C4D to produce clothing/props/models to be used in Poser (although only one of the new commands below is even vaguely Poser-specific). Whether I'm modelling a humanoid figure or some clothing item for a figure, I pretty much always use the same workflow:

• Create some base form of Low Resolution 'Cage' mesh of the model.
• Split the cage mesh in half on the X-axis and put it into a C4D Symmetry Object
• Put the Symmetry Object under a C4D HyperNURBS Object
• Continue refining that lo-res, half mesh (cuts, extrudes, stretching, pushing, whatever)
• Once I have a decent 1st stab model ready for some testing, I create material zones (polygon selection tags), body-part groups for that half of the model (more polygon selection tags, plus a Riptide 'Group' tag to track them later in the exported .obj file) and various other region selections (more polygon selection tags that can span or encompass multiple of the previous tags, plus a Riptide 'Region' tag to track them later in the exported .obj file).
• Collapse (Make Editable) the Symmetry Object to create the other half of the mesh.
• Switch over to BodyPaint's UV Edit layout/mode and do the UV Mapping.
• (Potentially) Export the mesh in .obj format for testing in some other app at this point.
• Assuming there's more work to do on the mesh, I split it back in half and put it back into a Symmetry Object for further refineing.
• Lather, Rinse, Repeat many of the above steps until satisfied.

...as you can see, this method of working tends to revolve around the creation of a symmetrical mesh, using C4D's Symmetry Object. I refer to this as a "Symmetry Workflow". During this process, I might end up going through the above scenereo many times before I'm done...

Whenever you delete half of your mesh, you are also deleting half of your UV Mapping and half of the (uniquely oriented) polygons. When you collapse the Symmetry Object to make the mesh whole again:

• During the modelling process (cuts, extrudes, welds, etc on the mesh), if your mesh had already been UV Mapped, that mapping might now be disjointed in places and need some repair work.
• The new half of the mesh gets the exact same UV Mapping as the half you were working with (all Left-Side or all Right-Side).
• All of the Selection Tags that contained polygons on the side of the model you were working with now also contain the mirrored polygons on the other side of the model.

...with enough work, you can re-create or fix the UV Mapping using tools already present in BodyPaint - these new plugin commands will greatly enhance and speed up that process (as well as the initial mapping process).

As for the selection tags, in some cases (like material zones and probably any region tags you've set up), it's probably fine - or even desirable - to have the new polygons added into the existing selections. But in the case of body-part group selections (for a Poser-style humanoid, for example), I typically have most of the following selection tags set up:

hip, abdomen, chest, neck, head

leftEye, lCollar, lShldr, lForeArm, lHand, lThumb1, lThumb2, lThumb3, lIndex1, lIndex2, lIndex3, lMid1, lMid2, lMid3, lRing1, lRing2, lRing3, lPinky1, lPinky2, lPinky3, lButtock, lThigh, lShin, lFoot, lToe

rightEye, rCollar, rShldr, rForeArm, rHand, rThumb1, rThumb2, rThumb3, rIndex1, rIndex2, rIndex3, rMid1, rMid2, rMid3, rRing1, rRing2, rRing3, rPinky1, rPinky2, rPinky3, rButtock, rThigh, rShin, rFoot, rToe

...note that for the first row of selections (center-line body-parts), it's ok for the selections to contain the new polygons from the other side of the mesh, but imagine having to fix up all of those other (50) selection tags every time you split/combine the mesh! This plugin comes with a one-click solution for that too.