a newbish question ><

Binxx

For some odd reason I can't seem to export my obj file into z brush, or it does but says that i don't have all quads... i was wondering if there was anything in Maya which could check for 5 sided poly or triangles, so I could make all quads. Thanks in advance

Firebert

Shift+RMB over your model in Maya
go down to Cleanup
this will pull up an options menu
in the Fix by Tesselation section, select only the "Faces with more than 4 sides" box
Hit Cleanup at the bottom
You will see your mesh go into Face component mode
The faces with more than 4 sides will be highlighted in orange and they will now be triangulated.
Take note of one or two of the n-gon areas you have, and undo the cleanup.
Focus on one area at a time. Go through and manually use other tools like Split Polygon, Merge Vert, etc. to make that n-gon a Poly. You may have to create new topology over a certain degree of your mesh to maintain a clean edgeflow.

Binxx

Wow that did the trick! Thanks a ton, your a life saver!

Cyrael

also I believe zbrush will convert them for you, I dont remember exactly what it says but choose the first option - convert to quads and triangles and it will do it for you, then you can re-export that base mesh and it will be all quads and tris - if its a game model then it will work well, if its not then Fireberts method is best.

Frump

There's another way to do it in maya which offers more control.

Select>Select Using Constraints

Set it to current and next selection, go into face selection mode. Now you have a bunch of options available to choose from. Select Nsided, Triangles or whatever you want depending on your needs. Then make a selection over the entire mesh and only the ngons, triangles or whatever will be highlighted. Then fix them and export again.

oXYnary

You know it should be apparent to me, but how is this done in max (select triangles on mesh)