[REQ] Triangles to quad ruby
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I came across this on the Thea forum, posted by Notareal, very informative and very relevant to creating proxys for subdividing with SDS.
Check out this video.
[flash=600,400:3vh05tjp]http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2158706[/flash:3vh05tjp]
Wondering if there would be a way to create a ruby that could take a model or a selection of faces and turn all polys into quads? This would really help me for one to create smooth lower poly meshes.
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+1 for this. it would be a really useful ruby to a lot of ppl.
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You could try Blender, I know its not the same, maybe a little bit of a workflow killer but it seems like it should be pretty simple, import SU model into Blender, select verts, Alt+j to convert tris to quads, export out of Blender. Solo, do you have a trianglated mesh that I could try and play with, something not too simple or too complex? If someone cant write a ruby for tris to quads, maybe something like Whats UV ruby would work, where all the exporting and importing would be automated so it wouldnt be such a workflow killer.
Mike
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@solo said:
Wondering if there would be a way to create a ruby that could take a model or a selection of faces and turn all polys into quads? This would really help me for one to create smooth lower poly meshes.
You should beware from the Quad appearance in 3D-modelling software. It does not mean at all that the geometry is composed by 'true' quads. As an example, the preview mode of Curviloft always shows Quads for the generated shape, whereas it is most often triangulated when generating the Sketchup geometry.
Keep in mind that a 3D modelling software is simply an intermediary to generate images, not physical objects.
Fredo
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Didier, I found it here: http://www.thearender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=4463
Thea forums, and prosperous year to you too.Alpro, try this, it's a bust made with SU, you will see the polys are mostly triangles.
I have left a request for Dale (Whaat) to reply on the SDS2 beta forums also.
@Fredo, now you are confusing me, so what we see is not what's there?
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Hi Solo,
A little OT but Solo, where did you get this video ? Very interesting.
Happy new year 2011
Answering my own question: http://guerrillacg.org/
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Other 3d applications that deal with quad faces allow for quads that are not co-planar. 3dsmax is one of them. In SU they have to be co-planar, which enforce an extra restriction to how useful quads are.
The quads in the other applications have the quads internally as triangles, as everything really is, but hides the fact from the user. In the same way that a face in SU really consists of triangles. (You can see the internal triangulation with my Probes plugin. http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=21472&p=180592#p180592) And it's why face count is not an accurate measurement of a model's complexity, but instead you should count all the triangles the model consists of. (my ModelInfo plugin does that: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=33233&p=293079#p293079 )
Converting triangles to quads - what kind of mesh did you have in mind? This is something that can't be applied to any mesh, it would have to be some regularities.
But due to the nature of quads in SU vs other apps - what I'm thinking is that the ideal solution is not making quads in SU, but finding a method for plugins to treat triangulated meshes in a quad-like manner. For my UV mapping plugin I'm working on a method where I try to find regular triangulated meshes where I can treat two sets of triangles like a quadface. When I have sorted the mesh into these virtual quads I can much easier traverse and manipulate the mesh.(I'm sleep deprived since last night - so please excuse my ramblings.
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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
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Here http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=309120#p309120 is v1.0 of my new idea to make quads - Quadtilateralizer...
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@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.
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