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Messages - ChrisT

#1
Support / A couple of requests for a future release
September 25, 2017, 12:37:24 PM
Hi, I bought Mesh Editor a few days back. I'll put my hand up and say firstly I come from a VFX background, starting with 3dsmax and later using XSI and Maya. As such, I am used to modelling using quads and say Turbosmooth (3dsmax). I would love to see a quad workflow in Mesh Editor, though I understand this may not be possible due to it not supporting quads as primitives? Not sure if this is the case.

So, I'm making a game, where the landscape is going to be a regular grid, where some parts are raised, or lowered to form the level. Whilst modelling, to help keep this grid pattern in mind, I use a chequer material, this implies that the landscape is quad poly based.

Now, I WANT to treat the tri-mesh, as much as I can, as a quad mesh. So, here are some small wishes, along the way that would help a little in this respect.

1. The ability to select quads. This could be a simple rule in a quad select mode, that any tri selected, also selects the tri next to it, that shares its longest edge. I know, this is a little jungle, but it most cases, it would result in a "quad" select.

2. This one is more critical for my workflow. Quad tri rotation. Imagine you have a "quad" selected. The edge I need to rotate, is the one that both tri's in the "quad" share. Lets say, to start off with, this edge, runs from top left, to bottom right, like this \ . But because of how this folds, I need it to run from bottom left, to top right, like this / .So this tool keeps all of the verticies of these two tris, plus their UVs, but then re-defines the two tries to "rotate" the shared edge, from \ to /. Why do I need this? Well, take a grid mesh, select two tris in its middle, that form a "quad" and pull them upwards on Y. You now have a truncated pyramid. If you look from above, and look at the pyramids corners, you'll see that all 4 are like this \ \ \ \ (or the opposite). However, for the pyramid to appear symmetrical, those edge orientations need to alternate like top left \, top right /, bottom left /, bottom right \. This would make each corner smooth like all the others.

So, of the two wishes above, you can see that to do item 2 easily, item 1 would be ideal. Item 1 of course, if done, opens the gateway for other quad based workflows, like ring and loop selections and so on. But right now, that lack of both 1 and 2 above, would kind of force me to use something like 3dsmax or Maya to produce a good looking mesh for my game.