In today’s extension article, we’re going to talk about an extension that contains a toolset designed to aid in Quad Face Modeling.
Plugin Name: Quad Face Tools
Plugin Developer: Thom Thom
Plugin Cost: Free! Please remember to donate to your developers.
Why Quads?
Some of you may have seen an extension out there called SubD. It’s an organic modeling extension that allows you to create organic shapes. What it does is the reason this is important is that it works best with shapes that are made out of quads, or 4 sided pieces of geometry. This toolset is designed to help you work with quads. However, it also has a number of useful selection tools as a week. One other thing to note is that many extensions, like curviloft and vertex tools, are designed to work with quads as a base functionality.
Where can you get it?
You can download it from the SketchUcation warehouse.
Tools Quad analysis -:
This will analyze your model and colorizes shapes based on if their geometry is quad based. As you can see, objects that are blue are triangles, objects that are green are quads, and objects that are red are Ngons or shapes with more than 5 sides.
Select Ring
The select ring allows you to expand the number of objects you have selected based on objects you already have selected. For example, in the sphere, you can select all the vertical lines using expand selection.
Select Loops
Select loops will basically select an entire line from end to end. This can be a giant timesaver as it allows you to quickly and easily hide and unhide hidden geometry.
Convert Sandbox
Convert sandbox allows you to convert a sandbox grid, which comes in as tri shapes, into a series of quads, allowing quad based modeling of sandbox shapes.
Convert Wireframe
Convert wireframe to quads will generate quad based geometry out of a wireframe grid.
Convert Triangulated
Convert triangulated mesh to quad will allow you to take a piece of geometry that’s a 4 sided shape with a triangulated edge and convert it to quad geometry. The triangulation tools allow you to adjust the way quads are triangulated, as well as removing and adding triangulation to objects.
Build Corners and Build Ends
It will attempt to generate quad corners and ends in your geometry. You will have a bit of trouble getting these to work properly. It has UV mapping tools for mapping textures as well as transition quads from smooth to unsmooth.
Insert loops
Insert loops allows you to insert geometry between the object you have selected.
