@alpro said:
Well forget the Blender route. Exported obj out of SU, imported to Blender, selected verts and changed tris to quads, no problems. Well a little problem, it only converted about 85% to quads, see pics. However the real problem was importing back into SU, like thomthom said the quads have to be coplanar in SU so when I imported your quaded head, SU put a hidden line everywhere it wasn't coplanar thus making quads into tris again.
Mike
Technically, all quads in any 3d application consists of triangles. It's just a matter of how the 3d application presents it. Internally each quad will consist of two triangles. SketchUp makes no effort to provide any form of quads and instead exposes the triangles directly to the user and leaves the responsibility there.
Further more, just having a set of quads as you do in your screenshot provides no real benefits as the topology isn't regular. It's going all over the place with a mix of quads and tris at random. To have an efficient topology you need the quads to be laid out in a manner so they make nice loops around the characteristics of the shape. Then you can use tools that makes use of this regularity of the quad mesh to perform actions such as selecting rings and loops so you can quickly and predictably modify the geometry you want.
To put it simply, quads has no benefit over tris unless the quads are laid out with a good topology.