Make Quads
Make Quads pairs neighbouring triangles of the Loaded Mesh back into quads. It is not a remesh: no vertex moves, nothing is added or removed, and UVs, normals, materials and textures are left exactly as they were. Only the way triangles are grouped into polygons changes, which is why it is safe to run on a textured model. There is no button for it — it runs from the keyboard: press Q by default, or Shift+Q for the version with the edge-flow repair pass.
Running Make Quads
| Shortcut | Action | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Q | Make Quads | Pairs triangles into quads and stops there. |
| Shift+Q | Make Quads (Repair Edge Flow) Vertexix | Pairs triangles, then re-cuts runs of quads whose edge loops kink so the loops run straight. |
Both are listed in the Remesh group of the Keyboard Setting tab and can be rebound there (see Keyboard Setting Tab). Turn the wireframe on to see the result — the wireframe is redrawn to show the new quads rather than the triangles under them.
When it finishes, the status line reports how many quads were made and how many triangles were left unpaired (and, with the repair pass, how many quads were re-cut). If nothing could be paired it says No triangle pairs could be merged into quads. Make Quads will not run while Manual Remesh, UV unwrapping, a bake or mesh preprocessing is in progress.
What it works on
Make Quads always works on the Loaded Mesh, the model you imported — not on the Generated Mesh.
- With polygons selected, only the selection is paired. A merge never reaches outside it, and the status line says “in selection” so you know the selection was noticed.
- With nothing selected, the whole mesh is paired.
Polygons outside the selection keep exactly the grouping they already have, so quads made by an earlier run are not rebuilt just because you are working on a different area. Your selection (and any hidden polygons) are kept afterwards, so you can press Q and then Shift+Q on the same region to compare the two without reselecting it. Because no vertex changes, Vertex Density Paint and other per-vertex work on the mesh is kept too.
How it chooses pairs
Every legal pairing is scored first, and the best are taken first, rather than each triangle simply grabbing whichever neighbour comes up first. Pairs where the shared edge is the longest edge of both triangles — the diagonal of a quad that was triangulated — go first, then the rest in order of how good a quad they make. A pairing is refused when:
- It would fold across a hard edge. Two triangles whose surfaces bend by more than about 40° stay as triangles, so creases are not flattened into one bent quad.
- The quad would not be convex. A concave quad shows up as a folded bowtie.
- The triangles belong to different materials. Material borders are never crossed.
- It would starve a vertex. A merge that would leave an interior vertex with fewer than four edges is skipped, because that is what turns a clean run of grid quads into a chevron of slanted ones.
Triangles that cannot be paired stay in the mesh as triangles; nothing is deleted.
Repair Edge Flow
Pairing one quad at a time can still go wrong across a run: one merge made across a grid cell's border strands its neighbours, each of which strands the next, and an edge loop that runs straight for several quads suddenly kinks. Make Quads (Repair Edge Flow) runs a second pass that finds these mis-paired chains and re-cuts them one step over, which straightens the loop and pairs up two triangles that had been left over. Use it when plain Make Quads leaves zig-zagging loops on a model that was originally built from quads.
Editions
Make Quads is available in Light, Vertexix and Ultra. The repair pass, Make Quads (Repair Edge Flow), is available in Vertexix and Ultra. In an edition without it, the shortcut shows which edition is needed on the status line.