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DOWNLOAD QUAD FACE TOOLS – https://extensions.sketchup.com/en/content/quadface-tools
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DOWNLOAD JOINT PUSH PULL – https://sketchucation.com/pluginstore?pln=JointPushPull
QUAD MODELING BASECAMP PRESENTATION – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27TmHqkJYOQ
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In today’s extension tutorial, we’re going to talk about an extension that contains a toolset designed to aid in Quad Face Modeling.
I want to start off by thanking my supporters on Patreon. Usually, they get to vote on the extension of the week, but I could not get the extension for this week to work, so I selected this one from the list.
Why quads? Some of you may have seen an extension out there called SubD. It’s an organic modeling extension that allows you to create organic shapes. What it does is it smooths out geometry to make it look more organic. The reason this is important is that it works best with shapes that are made out of quads, or 4 sided pieces of geometry.
Quads work best for something like this because they’re predictable in the way that they smooth.
If you want to learn more about quads, Aaron Dietzen from SketchUp did an excellent presentation on quads that you can check out here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27TmHqkJYOQ .
This toolset is designed to help you work with quads. However, it also has a number of useful selection tools as week.
Plugin Name: Quad Face Tools
Plugin Developer: ThomThom
Plugin Cost: Free! Please remember to donate to your developers.
Where can you get it? You can download it from the SketchUcation warehouse.
One other thing to note is that many extensions, like curviloft and vertex tools, are designed to work with quads as a base functionality.
Tools –
Quad analysis – this will analyze your model and colorizes shapes based on if their geometry is quad based. As you can see, objects that are blue are triangles, objects that are green are quads, and objects that are red are N-Gons, or shapes with more than 5 sides.
Select Ring – The select ring allows you to expand the number of objects you have selected based on objects you already have selected. For example, in this sphere, you can select all the vertical lines using expand selection.
Select Loops – Select loops will basically select an entire line from end to end. This can be a giant timesaver as it allows you to quickly and easily hide and unhide hidden geometry.
Skipping ahead, convert sandbox allows you to convert a sandbox grid, which comes in as tri shapes, into a series of quads, allowing quad based modeling of sandbox shapes.
Convert wireframe to quads will generate quad based geometry out of a wireframe grid.
Convert triangulated mesh to quad will allow you to take a piece of geometry that’s a 4 sided shape with a triangulated edge and convert it to quad geometry.
The triangulation tools allow you to adjust the way quads are triangulated, as well as removing and adding triangulation to objects.
Build Corners and build ends will attempt to generate quad corners and ends in your geometry. I had a bit of trouble getting these to work properly.
It has a UV mapping tools for mapping textures as well.
Smooth and unsmooth quads allow you to quickly transition quads from smooth to unsmooth.
Finally, insert loops allows you to insert geometry between the objects you have selected.
I know this was a lot of info, and we’ll talk about this extension more in the future.
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