Quadrulate
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They get converted to triangles with what I'm using. There might be a better converter out there that keeps them.
With all faces being quads in SketchUp however, it guarantees a cleaner triangulation. When you let the exporter decided how to triangulate a 5-nth sided poly, you can get some crazy triangulation with very smaller face slivers.
I'm having to manually triangulate most of my SketchUp model to make sure it doesn't create these small sliver tri's. But then you're left with a bulky SketchUp model. Compared to 5-nth sided polys quads are still bulky, but better than tri's.
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actually you can use Whaat's UVMapper beta ruby to export cleanly from SU.
the file the Ruby writes for the mapping is a perfectly useable OBJ format file you can read into anything that can read OBJ. does not triangulate the model.. what you model is what you get
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@khai said:
actually you can use Whaat's UVMapper beta ruby to export cleanly from SU.
the file the Ruby writes for the mapping is a perfectly useable OBJ format file you can read into anything that can read OBJ. does not triangulate the model.. what you model is what you get
I'm not even sure if my UVMapper can be used for exporting an entire scene or just a collection of selected faces.
I think the 3DS format supports only triangles, right? But what I think alz is saying is that the SketchUp 3DS exporter does not triangulate polygons in an ideal way.
I have also found that SketchUp does not triangulate convex polygons very well. It ends up creating slivers of small triangles.
Subdivide and Smooth does triangulation 'under the hood' and for triangulating a convex polygon, I just add a point to the center of the polygon and join all the polygon points to it. Is this the type of triangulation that you want?
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Whaat? it can. trust me
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I tried out UVMapper -- and it works really nice! If a model only has one texture you can import it (into 3dsMAX) as a complete model. This OBJ aspect is a lot better than other importers I just tried (scale and position is correct).
If UVMapper was expanded to input a file location and support multiple UVs, you could export the whole model (even just for OBJ importing/exporting)!
And yes -- the native subdivision in SketchUp creates some wacky face slivers. I saw it mentioned somewhere else, but I wish Google would develop a different function to criss-cross divisions, rather than pinwheel them like spokes. (I miss AtLast's more frequent improvements)
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If anyone is familiar with 3ds MAXSCRIPT, here's a Quadrulate script someone made. Granted it's not much use for SketchUp, but maybe some of the concepts in it will help someone find a ruby solution for SketchUp.
http://www.scriptspot.com/scripts/web_upload/Gene%20Crucean/quadrangulate.mzp
(*.mzp is just a zip file for Max)
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