I see threads discussing this back in 2012, but has anyone ever built a tool that works like the quadrangulate tool in Softimage? Or even anything similar to Softimage's polygon reduction tool?

I often get models from clients that come from all sorts of packages & are routinely a big mess of tri's that need cleaning. Softimage has always done an outstanding job of cleaning up these meshes - most of the time it helped me avoid retopologizing everything.

I've tried divide with the max edges set to 4. I've tried polyreduce, but it doesn't seem to do nearly as good of job as what Softimage does.

I've played with the Instant Meshes connection in the Games desktop, but that's really nothing like what I'm looking for.

I'd love to see something equivalent in Houdini that doesn't require me (a non-programmer, mathematical neanderthal) to code anything.

Is there anything out there?

-Paul

The new polygon reduction tool is pretty similar to the SI one no?
For the quadrangulate I generally open Softimage…

It's been a while since I've opened Softimage, but my recollection was that the reduction tool allowed you to do things like remove all internal edges on a planar surface & create an ngon. For things like converted CAD models it really helped to clean things up.

Maybe I am remembering things incorrectly, but I thought SI's tool had a ton more control than what polyreduce has.