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Question about the constraints on untriangulate

andybandyb Posts: 3
edited December 1969 in Carrara Discussion

Recently purchased 8.5 pro and am doing my best to get to grips with it but I've hit a mental block with exactly how untriangulate works. The manuals do not provide me any clues so I'm hoping some experienced users may answer this easily.

I'm working with a mesh which I'm cleaning it up by hand. Its an old tri-mesh and I've imported it and want to rig and animate it. The process I'm going through is to turn pairs of tris into quads. For the most part I can select a pair, use untriangulate and job done, I have the quad I want.

With some pairs they just will not combine. Sometimes I specify a pair, tell it to untriangulate and it will take one of the tris and a different adjacent one to turn into a quad.

So......

Can anyone tell me how I can ensure the two tris I've selected will be used in the untriangulate or explain why I can't

TIA.

Comments

  • JonstarkJonstark Posts: 2,738
    edited December 1969

    Not an expert modeler and never ran into this (or noticed it when I was untriagulating) but as a workaround have you tried simply deleting/cutting the line that separates the 2 triangles?

    Sorry if that's not helpful, there are some pretty expert modelers that frequent the forum, perhaps one of them will pop in to the thread soon and give a better answer.

  • RoygeeRoygee Posts: 2,247
    edited December 1969

    Can't tell you how it works and never really thought about it before reading your post; I normally select the whole model and hit untriangulate, then manually clean up what is left.

    After reading your post, I tried untriangulating sets of two tri's - sometimes it works, other times it does nothing and other times it untriangulates one of the selected polys and an adjacent unselected one. I haven't been able to identify a common cause excepting that it won't untriangulate if one of the polys selected is a quad.

    Anyway, to get back to your question - select the connecting edge and hit unlink, or simply hit the backspace key. Unlink only lets you do one at a time, but backspace allows multiple selections.

    If you have Blender, that has a convert to quad function that will sort out about 90% of tri's. I've yet to come across another app - including Meshlab - that will do it that well.

  • JonstarkJonstark Posts: 2,738
    edited December 1969

    Dammit, 'edge' is the right term I couldn't think of. I knew 'line' looked wrong but I couldn't for the life of me think of what the right term was... :)

  • de3ande3an Posts: 915
    edited December 1969

    Back when DAZ actually had a publicly accessible bug tracker, I submitted a bug report for the untriangulate command. It was acknowledged that it was not working properly but was not a high priority item to fix.
    So for now, if untriangulate is used, you have to just accept what it does and manually clean up the rest.

  • andybandyb Posts: 3
    edited December 1969

    Thanks for the replies.

    The method I'd been using was the deletion method, highlight the two to get the edges marked, delete, delete and then ctrl-f to fill with a quad. The unlink works too so I've two ways of achieving what I want, both pretty fast. Glad to know the problem wasn't me though :)

    Interesting about the bug tracker, shame we can't browse it.

  • RoygeeRoygee Posts: 2,247
    edited December 1969

    Just as a matter of interest, why do you need to untriangulate?

    I am practically anal about making sure my models are all quads, but on occasion I have had to use 3DS models, which are all tri's and found that it's just not worth the effort and they work just as well, even for rigging. The organic models, even though they don't look that way, have edge flow which is good for deforming.

  • andybandyb Posts: 3
    edited December 1969

    I don't have to but I do want to. When animating models I do prefer to work with quads and given a choice I'll go this way. The model I'm currently working on I intend to be a base for a number of others so it makes sense to clean it up once, right at the beginning before I even start rigging it. I also intend for a low poly version so again, having it clean helps.

    The other is that I'm new to Carrara so I'm learning the interface and also what the functionality offers or lacks compared to what I'm used to. So far I'm enjoying using the tool which is a good thing.

    My only real gripe so far is the font point for the UI, on my HD laptop its so small.....

  • RoygeeRoygee Posts: 2,247
    edited December 1969

    Thanks - just curious :)

    Quads are always better!

  • Design AcrobatDesign Acrobat Posts: 459
    edited December 2014

    andyb said:
    I don't have to but I do want to. When animating models I do prefer to work with quads and given a choice I'll go this way. The model I'm currently working on I intend to be a base for a number of others so it makes sense to clean it up once, right at the beginning before I even start rigging it. I also intend for a low poly version so again, having it clean helps.

    The other is that I'm new to Carrara so I'm learning the interface and also what the functionality offers or lacks compared to what I'm used to. So far I'm enjoying using the tool which is a good thing.

    My only real gripe so far is the font point for the UI, on my HD laptop its so small.....

    This is on Windows 8.1 and a GeForce Card, but there is an option in the Control panel I think for all Windows users to enlarge font. See image. I left the control panel font small and have the Carrara 8 Pro font side by side, so you can see the difference. Everything becomes larger including the icons in the Carrara software.

    control_panel_enlarge.jpg
    777 x 322 - 58K
    Post edited by Design Acrobat on
  • andybandyb Posts: 3
    edited December 1969

    Sadly on Windows 7 it has no effect on the Carrara UI

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