Convert .obj to non-quad in Blender for MH

[Aldun]

Hey guys,

I'm looking to do the following: there's this .obj piece of clothing I'm importing in Blender, to import later in MH. Due to the nature of the file, it gets imported in all tri's. Now, this makes it impossible for MakeClothes to convert it into clothing to get into MakeHuman. I've tried the Alt+J (tris to quads) function in Blender, to no avail: I keep getting the error "Cannot be used because it has non-quad faces".

How would I go about to get the shirt ready for MakeClothes to progress?

Thanks

[brkurt]

Hey guys,

I'm looking to do the following: there's this .obj piece of clothing I'm importing in Blender, to import later in MH. Due to the nature of the file, it gets imported in all tri's. Now, this makes it impossible for MakeClothes to convert it into clothing to get into MakeHuman. I've tried the Alt+J (tris to quads) function in Blender, to no avail: I keep getting the error "Cannot be used because it has non-quad faces".

How would I go about to get the shirt ready for MakeClothes to progress?

Thanks

You've asked a big question. This is a consistent problem in clothing models. A simple conversion from tris to quads won't give you what you need, especially if you want to animate. Your best course of action is to do a re-topology, meaning that you will use your present triangular object mesh as a template, and you will 'paste' or snap quads to it.

For example, since you are doing a shirt, you may want to create diagonals rather than a grid across the shoulder joints, to solve animation problems later.





Look for "Blender retopology" tutorials on YouTube and Vimeo; the techniques will be specific to the version of Blender you are using.

Finally, there are other programs that may do a better retopology job; the only experience I have is with 3dCoat.

[joepal]

I keep getting the error "Cannot be used because it has non-quad faces".

It's entirely possible that the blender function still leave a few tris. You'll have to find these and fix them manually.

In the select menu there is a "select faces by sides" (probably only in face select mode)

When you do this you get a "tool" panel where you can set how many sides you want to look for Here I specified 3 to select all tris.

[joepal]

Also note that you may have faces which have *more* than four sides. These won't be touched by tris-to-quads. So also try to select for five-sided faces for example.

[learning]

As far as I know there's no reliable way to quadrungulate a triangular mesh without any non-quads left, at least not in Blender. It's not like it's an algorithmically unsolvable problem, in fact some time ago I easily found quite a few papers proposing such algorithms. It's just that nobody bothered to implement any of them (yet?)

[ThomasL]

The Remesh modifier is an implementation of a quadrangulation algo, iirc. However, it doesn't work for manifolds with boundaries (it fills up all holes), so it is not very useful for clothes.

[badwolf]

it may be possible to triangulate the mesh and then go from tris to quads (with some issues of course).

[Aldun]

Thanks guys, you made me realise I'm trying to tackle something that can be solved in a million other, easier ways.

For the ones wondering how I solved it: I no longer use MakeClothes, I just import my MH model to Blender, add the clothes in a Tpose and use Mixamos Auto-Rigger to glue the clothes to the model. Never thought it would be that easy. So currently I only use MH for the customization, not even for the rig.