Maya Quadrangulate Workflow

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Here's another long video I created. I talk about converting polygonal meshes with triangular faces to quadrilateral (or quad) faces, using the Quadrangulate command in Maya.


First I talk about using the command with its default settings. Then I go into more tricky situations where the command does not work the first time, and how we can still achieve a quadrangulated geometry in the end.

In summary, the most important settings to take note of, from the command options, would be:

- 'Keep hard edges' checkbox (I always turn it on. many external applications export meshes with all edges hardened. In which case, the command will not perform any quadrangulation)

- Angle threshold. The lower this number is, the more choosy Maya will be when deciding when 2 triangular faces are to be turned into a single quadrilateral face. 0 will tell Maya to quadrangulate 2 triangular faces only if they form a perfectly flat planar surface (ie, only if they are co-planar). A maximum angle threshold of 180 means that Maya will take all possible pairs of adjoining triangles will be converted to quads.

I hope this helps you in your mesh clean-up.

Watch the same video on Vimeo.com

Maya Quadrangulate Workflow from Patrick Woo on Vimeo.
Location: Singapore

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