Hi Gerbeiter, this is clueless, but I'd stay away from Editable Patch. I have the bad feeling it could mess up your work.
First, if you want to actually see what's the hidden Editable Poly Triangulation you can use:
$.allEdges = true -- to display hidden edges
$.allEdges = false -- to hide them
provided current selection $ is an Editable Poly
That's only a visual effect.
If you want to make it "real", just Convert to Editable Mesh, which is a safe operation, go to Edge SubObject selection level, select all edges in viewport, under Surface Properties in command panel press Visible. Then you can convert the model back to Editable Poly.
With this process you can choose what edges make visible and what leave invisible. You got some threshold too to let coplanar mesh faces undivided.
I've been spending hours trying to figure out why xnormal won't bake my textures and gives me an error. turns out it's because you need to triangulate before exporting. This thread has saved my life. Thankyou
By the way, about the triangulation thing: recently i realised that a triangulation on export yield different results depending on the targeted file type. In my case, i exported an fbx, textured it and all, but applied the material on an obj. I had some shading errors. I tried everything and was going nuts. But then i realized some triangles were on different directions, because of the different ways these exporters work.
In 3dsmax, toss a "turn to poly" modifier on top of your stack, set the number of sides to 3, export and then you can remove the modifier and go back to working with quads.
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But I swear there was a triangulate modifier even though I just checked and there doesn't seem to be in 2009.
First, if you want to actually see what's the hidden Editable Poly Triangulation you can use: That's only a visual effect.
If you want to make it "real", just Convert to Editable Mesh, which is a safe operation, go to Edge SubObject selection level, select all edges in viewport, under Surface Properties in command panel press Visible. Then you can convert the model back to Editable Poly.
With this process you can choose what edges make visible and what leave invisible. You got some threshold too to let coplanar mesh faces undivided.
You definitely don't want to convert to Editable Patch. No no no.
if you want to do it non destructively, use the "turn to poly" modifier on top of your model and limit the polygon size to 3.
I've automated this process by creating this macroScript (i've linked it to my own quadmenu)
You can use that code or the script attached.