Quads instead of triangles

[contactscheid@gmail.com]

Does anyone know how to take a triangle model and make a mesh have quads instead in houdini?

[Lucy Coleclough]

On 25/07/2019 at 1:11 AM, contactscheid@gmail.com said:

Does anyone know how to take a triangle model and make a mesh have quads instead in houdini?

It's not a simple issue, especially if you want quads for the sake of deformation or a subd workflow. 

Your best option is to use retopology tools. I'm used to quad draw in Maya but I believe houdini's tool is called topobuild, so I'd watch a few tutorials on that.

[Atom]

The simplest trick is to drop down a VDBFromPolygons then drop down a ConvertVDB (defaults to volume, change to polygons) to turn the volume back into polygons. You will get all quads, but not necessarily flowing loop cuts.

[Jesper Rahlff]

There is also Insta mesh 

https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/houdini-game-dev-tools-instant-meshes-bridge/

[acey195]

Or you could write your own quadrify node, with some wrangles/python and a dissolve node.

What we did, was finding for every triangle, the longest edge (out of 3)
Then, if a neighboring triangle has the same edge as its longest edge, group it.
Afterwards you can just dissolve this group and you have a quite reasonable quadrify process.

It will of course keep some triangles this way, depending on how have modeled the "joints"
Also can't share the code unfortunately, but that could give you a start.