Tris back to quads

[drumsum]

Hi,
When you extract meshes from a game they are all made of tris. But to use those meshes properly they should be in quads. Does anyone know a good tool to convert the tris back into quads? While keeping good edgeflow.
I know that there are "tri to quad" tools in packages like Blender, but they are just 'guessing' the original retopology so they make mistakes and I am ending up with bad topology.
Thanks in advance for your help.

[BlueFlytrap]

Other way around. Proper game ready models are all tri.
The all quads rule only applies to offline rendering stuff making heavy use of displacement. Which game models are not.

[SaberVS7]

Hello friend! Looks like you accidentally got dragged over to the universe where PlayStation won 5th Gen during the recent Large Hadron Collider experiment!

Don't worry, I'll call up my friends at SERN and get you back to your home worldline as soon as possible, this happens all the time. While you're here though, could you tell me what Sega's 8th Gen consoles are like? Can they do 4k/60FPS?

[Paul-Simon]

The fuck are you on about?

[DOG-GY]

this is an unsolvable problem and bad practice.

topology is arbitrary, so any algorithm is guessing at what the flow should be. attempting to convert the models back to quads/ngons would ruin the integrity of any normal maps and other textures as tri directions inevitably get flipped. the tangents then no longer match and there will be some texture warping, from not very noticeable to extreme. most professional models contain hand authored triangles which always cause the algorithms problems when they get to that spot, in addition to humans working with manual/auto triangulated ngons that the algorithms don't arent smart enough to understand.

so if you want to use game models in offline rendering you have two options: leave them alone or be prepared to do a lot of manual work

[drumsum]

Understood. Thanks very much for your help everyone!

[CP_Unit2]

Uh its definitely solvable.
Just not always the best when done automatically

There is even a tris to quads option in blender

[Grodbert]

I know that there are "tri to quad" tools in packages like Blender, but they are just 'guessing' the original retopology so they make mistakes and I am ending up with bad topology.

Ignoring how the thread has been silent for 9 days, it only works if the models was originally made out of quads like you said, most game models aren't, this is why he said it's not solvable (whatever that's supposed to mean).
Any algorithm that guesses the correct quad topology while mantaining all the textures (or even deforming them accordingly) is still out of reach and frankly useless.

[Magman77]

You can actually get pretty good results from those tri->quad tools if you break the model into subcomponents and apply it selectively, and this also allows you to intervene and pin down any troublesome regions without losing the entire conversion.