Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2010/05/01/down-with-tris-long-live-quads-close-in-work-on-my-blender-spaceship-model/

After a long night watching pretty much all of Mad Men 3 back-to-back on DVD it’s once more to the spaceship model for more mesh tweaking. It’s time to turn all those tri’s peppered over my model like a pox into beautiful even quads – without compromising the complex mesh of this Vega Strike game spaceship.

The Vega Strike game engine won't like these triangles

But first some procrastination. What does Google say about the fine art of losing tri’s in Blender.

As usual the first hit I found giving advice about Blender issues was a post on BlenderArtists.org. It contains a couple of useful hints on how to kill tri’s. I also found a general discussion on Blender Newbies. It blames the subsurf modifier for the need to get rid of tri’s, and my spaceship is intended to have subsurf. This other Blender Newbies thread has a cool tip for slightly modifying tri’s that won’t convert into quads. You change their mind with the smooth command. Cool but too destructive my finely tuned spaceship model. OK enough of that. On with the job.

now one quad has replaced the two tri's

Two tri’s right next to each other was an easy win. I simply highlighted them with face select in edit mode and pressed ctrl J. Now as you can see above my spaceship has a quad that looks a bit like a necktie instead of those original tri’s circled in red in the first image in this post.

I hoped they were all going to be this easy – but…

I had two triangles at the mirror seam which refused to play nice and turn into a quad. I tried pressing ctrl j, I tried pressing F – and nothing. They just sat there.

So I deleted them and it turns out there was no edge at the mirror axis. I solved this little problem by selecting the two “hanging” vertexes and pressing f to draw a line. Then I switched to edge select and selected the four sides of my new four sided hole in the mesh. I then simply pressed f, and a quad was born.

No triangle could resist the power of my logical and spatial mind.

I did have to chase some triangles all the way to the mirror edge of the model on the central axis before I could merge two vertexes and finally get them to disappear, but even the most obstinate triangles could finally be squeezed out of existence at the mirror seam – leaving hopefully a spaceship model that will behave well and not throw up too many shading artifacts once it is in game.

OK, on to the next job in getting this model ready for baking.