File Conversion Keeping Quads?

S

Sad Max

Artful Dodger
So here I am modeling a bunch of stuff in Sketchup Pro, and for compatibility purposes with the VFX dept. and my fellow designers I'm exporting .obj, .3DS and .VRML files, mostly for import into Rhino.

Alas all of these conversions yield tripled polys, which means that there's now entirely too much geometry for the purpose of each object being converted. And the Rhino .skp importer also delivers tripled polys.

Is anyone familiar with a file format converter that will retain quadrangles as quads without automatically tripling them?
 
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It sounds like the export function in Sketchup is converting everything to tri's.
I know C4D imports all .3ds as tri's which has been a pain.
C4D also exports .3ds as tri's in past experience.

Wavefront's Object File Format , .obj, should get exported as quads.

Just to be sure, there is a simple check you can do to find out for sure if Sketchup is exporting quads or all tri's in the obj format.
Open the .obj file with any text editor. Look for lines beginning with 'f'.
That stands for faces.
Example...

f 29/63 27/56 25/53
f 29/61 30/65 28/60 27/57

The first line is a triangle, having 3 groups of numbers.
The second line is a quad, having 4 groups of numbers.

The format of the numbers may vary depending on what your exporting but basically your looking for grouped numbers with slashes followed by a space.

If Sketchup is indeed exporting everything as tri's then another option is to try obtaining the Sketchup File Format of Sketchup's project file itself, extracting the objects data from that file, assuming it's still in quads at that point, and writing your own conversion to obj format.

I haven't looked into it yet but if that's something you'd like to look at, I can spend some time looking at it. Extracting the UV's may be a bit bothersome though. I'd have to look into it. Let me know.

//Oh, also check the preferences of the program to be sure there isn't some stupid Exporting Options dialog. You never know.
 
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