Triangles to quads
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I use a ruby from 1001bit tools to extrude railing shapes while not losing the correct orientation of the railing. The ruby generates a very clean mesh but it's triangulated. Does anyone have any experience converting triangles to quads? I want to take the railing shapes into modo. Modo can take them as triangles but it's happier, especially when UVing, if the mesh is all quads. Any advice at all would be appreciated. On other forums I've learned that both Blender and Wings3D can do this but I haven't yet figured out how and I find Blender to be a bit hard to master.
TIA
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I know how to do it in blender.
( learned last week)•Import mesh, delete the edge object. (if you export in kmz (collada) from sketchup, it will have a geometry object + an edge object).
•Select the mesh/ model object, and enter edit mode.
•Select all geometry, and click spacebar > Edit > Faces > Convert to quads.
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I assume that those diagonals in quads are for triangulation sake, IOW quads won't lose faces without them?
In that case you might be able to use deletecoplanaredges.rb by J. Dolabany (http://www.crai.archi.fr/RubyLibraryDepot/Ruby/en_edi_page.htm). Select the mesh you want make into quads and run the script from right-click context menu. -
Hi folks.
Another possibility is to export as a DWG and then reimport with the option to merge coplanar faces.
Just ideas.
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Thanks for the replies.
I tried the export to DWG idea - no luck (but definitely an inventive suggestion).I guess I'll have to learn my way around Blender (groan!).
I look forward to a future in which all file formats translate all other file formats without difficulty.
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Well, as Google revealed some future secrets:
http://sketchupdate.blogspot.com/2009/08/coming-soon-in-google-sketchup.html
this may even come sooner than suspected (although some other parts of the news won't be good news for the free users) -
As has been said... Faces get triangulated when they need to be that shape to retain their face - a three sided shape of edges will always take a face but a four sided shape of edges might not.
For example, in my 'lathe' script every face is initially made triangulated, then at the end any coplanar edges are deleted so that you get the minimum number of faces.
If you are getting triangulated faces you can optimize them back to quads wherever possible by using a delete_coplanar_edges tool as explained here [there are a few available for free download] - simply edit the group/compo and 'select all', then use context_menu item to remove coplanar edges... check that the version you use looks at the faces and only erases the edge if the two faces' materials are the same ! -
you may want check MeshLab OS for doing this too, the #1 tool for editing and processing triangulated 3D meshes.
hth,
Norbert -
Thanks again all -
This issue is forcing me to delve a bit deeper into the nature of lines / edges and how SketchUp sees them vs how modo sees them. The triangles I'm dealing with are not coplaner (think of the rectangles on the side of a curving helical band - the rectangles can 'bend' because they're made from two triangles) so I realize now that none of the conversion tools will work. But I can import the mesh into modo and then manually delete the triangles. modo can deal with a 'bent' plane in a way SketchUp can't. It can handle the resulting mesh with no problems except when it comes to making a UV map - then it hiccups. But the handrail mesh I'm working on has thousands of triangles so manually deleting them isn't realistic.
I'm going to have to work around the UV issue from another angle other than trying to delete the triangles.
It's all a learning process.
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Is there an update on this information.... new tools that transforms triangles into a pure quad mesh?
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@duanekemp said:
Is there an update on this information.... new tools that transforms triangles into a pure quad mesh?
ThomThoms plugin 'CleanUp³' is capable of connecting co-planar faces, for a further processing ThomThoms 'SubD' might be worth a look too.
There are several tools available which should be able to remesh triangles to quads as e.g. the commercial 'ZBrush' or '3D-Coat' as well as free 'Instant Meshes' or good ol' 'Meshlab'.
btw, resurrecting 10 year old threads should be avoided, just post a new thread instead.
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