Friday, July 19, 2013

Quickly convert n-gon or 5 sided polygons into quads in Maya


Often times when modeling human heads you end up with 5 sided polygons at the sides of the mouth, eyes, forehead etc. where your edge rings meet. These can potentially cause problems in the pipeline so sometimes it's best to get rid of them.

UPDATE: I'm going to add additional methods for converting n-gons to quads shortly. Keep in mind this is just one possible method, and avoids tris as well as n-gons. 

Here is a little technique to quickly change them into quads.

Select your model, go to Faces Selection mode and select the offending 5 sided face or n-gon

Then go to Polygons dropdown menu in the left. Edit Mesh>Add divisions and
click the little settings box next to "add divisions".


Make sure division levels is set to "1" and Add divisions is set to "exponentially"


Click "Add Divisions"

The 5 sided face is immediately cut into 4 quads. Now you can just run each division line into your topology and boom the n- is gon! :) You may need to adjust the resulting topology a bit to even out the detail.

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