Am lofting cross-sections with different number of points. PolyLoft is working well but seems to triangulate more than seems necessary. Is there a way to loft cross-sections and maintain quads below a certain non-planer threshold?

Or… is there a post PolyLoft SOP or process that will “un-triangulate” surfaces based on a non-planer threshold?

Thanks

What I do in these cases is use the skin sop, which adds extra points where it needs them and then remove those extra points by snaping the points in the skin back to the original profiles. Finally do a fuse to clean up. This method has the effect of creating the minimum number of triangles in your loft.

I don't know if there is another way to do the snapping so I wrote a tool to do it. You can get it from the Vex page of www.houdinitools.com [houdinitools.com] its called snapTo.

Interesting Idea Simon. Unfortunately I'm lofting between closed cross-sections that don't necessarily have their first points relative to each other… and the primitives are often in opposite directions. In this case skinning between these cross-sections is not as successful as lofting.

Thanks for the tip though… snapTo will come in handy for future use.

I have another sop that does auto-reversing and one that does auto sorting too. Not sure I've posted them yet though.

You could try the triToQuad sop from the hdk page that might clean up the triangles a bit after the polyloft.

You might just want to do the blunt work and use polyknit and have precise control over where your quads are created. Using polyknit also lets you control the direction your polygons are facing.