Creating partial geometry shell?

Diaspora

My use case is that when I have a piece of clothing like pants that have mesh smoothing, I want the mesh smoothing to only collide with the legs, hips, and feet of the character. I want the pants to ignore any contact with the forearms, hands, and fingers such as if the character during an animation brushes the pants while walking.

I tried to make a geometry shell and then turn off the 'visibility' of everything I didn't want affecting the mesh smoothing but mesh smoothing is affected by the presence of geometry, not its visibility to the renderer.

What can I do to get the result I'm after in my use case? What I essentially need is the ability to create geometry shells of only parts of my figures. 

felis

I don't think I understand what you are trying to do.

But to create a partial geoshell, you can export a geoshell and in a modeller delete the unwanted parts.

Then import in DS, run transfer rigging to the character, and if parented to the character act as a partial geoshell.