Tool for converting triangles to quads

[Michoko]

Hello

I’d need a tip, please. I currently have a low poly mesh made of triangles. I’d like to detail it with Zbrush, so I tried to subdivide it several times as is, but the results were not really satisfying, with polygons looking more like a “spider web” (making them harder to smooth for example).

Therefore I’d like to initially convert the low poly mesh to quads, which would be evenly distributed in the mesh. My problem is that if I import the model, telling Zbrush to convert triangles to quads with the Tri2Quad slider, the automatic process sometimes associates 2 triangles that should not be. I tried various values with the slider, but I never get the correct results.

Here is an illustration…

The full triangles model:

As you can see at the level of hips and belly, the quads are not the same on the left and right side.

So my question is: is there a way, even with an external tool, to convert the triangles 3D model to quads in a more symetrical way, as if it was made of quads from the start? I suppose it may require some manual editing, but I don’t know where to start from.

Thank you very much four your help!
Michoko

Attachments

[lemonnado]

Remeshing is a terrible thing in every 3d app as the algorithms simply do not yield what the humanoid in front of the screen expects. The best thing to do in your case is to load the geometry and create an ‘unified skin’. That will yield a dense mesh consisting out of quads perfectly suited for your further experiments. Play with the sliders and you will yield something much better than the tri’s which are excellent once you have your final geometry but otherwise useless for further manipulation (as you have encountered).
Cheers and good luck!
Lemo

[Wiljami]

You can make this by hand if you like. Juts download some lowpoly modeling tool like wings3D and delete the useles lines between tris to make quads
Wings3D is very simple program to use and you can find it from www.wings3d.com and it’s free.

[furrykef]

The best thing to do in your case is to load the geometry and create an ‘unified skin’. That will yield a dense mesh consisting out of quads perfectly suited for your further experiments.

Be warned that a unified skin is not very good if you want to animate something, though. The topology won’t really work, and your polygon count will probably be too high. Unified skins are fine if you’re only making an image in ZBrush, though.

I’d suggest that you just avoid converting the mesh to triangles in the first place if you can. But if you didn’t make the model yourself, that’s not always possible, of course… If you made it yourself in a different program, though, you shouldn’t have to convert it to triangles.

• Kef

[Prayer]

blender has a killer script to convert tri’s top quads
www.blender.org

[Michoko]

Thank you for your kind replies!

I had tried a unified skin, but unfortunately it was smoothing my geometry a bit too much. So I went for Wings, decided to remove the edges manually, when I found a Wings plugin called Untriangulate, that is available in the latest Wings version. You can access it in Faces mode, in the Tesselate submenu item. To my surprise, it gives very good results!

So thanks a lot for pointing this out, I think it will become a viable solution for Triangles->Quads conversion.

See you
Michoko

[Michoko]

Wow Prayer! I just tried Blender script, and indeed it rocks! It took me a bit of time to figure it out (the UI is not that intuitive at first), but the results are almost perfect!

Thanks a lot for the tip!

Michoko

[Escape]

Michoko,

Could you post a screenshot of the converted tri to quad model? I have a ton of my old models that I have slowly been manualy converting to quads to use in Z. Would help alot to have a script to do it for me.

Thanks,
Escape

[system]

I realize this thread is close to a year old, but as I was scouring the internet looking for a similar solution, I came across this handy technique that can be done in MAX.

I thought I would share it here just in case someone else needs a solution to the same problem.

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/beiy/tutorials/quadrangulate.html

If this has been discussed before, I apologize in advance.

[solomon]

I realize this thread is close to a year old, but as I was scouring the internet looking for a similar solution, I came across this handy technique that can be done in MAX.

I thought I would share it here just in case someone else needs a solution to the same problem.

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/beiy/tutorials/quadrangulate.html

If this has been discussed before, I apologize in advance.

Thank You Thank You Thank you!!!

and thanks once again