I have a 3D MAX mesh that I want to use in an animation (in Vue). The mesh has an incredibly high polycount. I have a polygon reducer that can reduce the polygons, but that also reduces the details. Is there a way, in any program or utility, to untriangulate a 3D Max mesh. In other words, to turn the triangles into four cornered polygons. Any other suggestions if this is not possible. I could manually do this, but with a few hundred thousand polygons, I wish there was an easier way.

geomagic decimator, designed to reduce polycount without losing detail.

geomagic Decimator works on Windows 95/98/NT/2000 and Silicon Graphics workstations. $295. I am on XP, and that is a little expensive, although I do agree that it looks like an awesome program. I am going to download the demo and see if it works on XP. Thanks.

perhaps you might try googling for max plugins? i use lightwave and was looking for just this tool -- something that converted tris to quads -- and was fortunate enough to find a free plugin.

OK, I can't use MAX plug-ins, because I don't have MAX. But I do have lightwave, so where could I find this plug-in? That would solve all my problems. I hope.

you want to go to flay.com and get "merge trigons". i notice there's another one there that i haven't tried called "utriforth". they're both lscripts.

Helgard..you might also try the detriangulate program by Anthony Appleyard.
I've never used it myself but have heard it works http://www.renderosity.com/freestuff.ez?Topsectionid=0&Form.SortOrder=UserName&Start=145&Form.Contrib=Anthony+Appleyard

Message edited on: 01/21/2005 21:50

Thanks Stefan. I have actually discovered after lots of experimentation, that I prefer the Cinema4D way of doing it. It lets you select a single polygon at a time, or a polygon group or area. It then evaluates the angle, and if removing the vertex to make two triangles a quad will result in a non-planar polygon, then it doesn't untriangulate that section. The problem I had with Lightwave is that I am using Lightwave 8 and the plug-ins were only for 5, 6 and 7. I managed to drop the polygon count on my test model from 60 000 to 35 000 without any loss of detail using Cinema 4D. Thanks for all the help from anyone.

You could give AccuTrans 3D a try, http://www.micromouse.ca/index.html it's shareware but download is fully functional, well worth the $20 US to register.

It's an object converter application, and that includes a nice bitmap to 3d, and 3d text/font to object generation. It includes a tool, to convert coplanar triangular faces to Quads. But also has handy tools for aligning normals and dealing with DXF files.

J. Stuart J.

Message edited on: 01/29/2005 20:10