Wireframe Material

[Jesse.Art]

Is it possible to render out a quad wireframe instead of tri's yet?

[TpwUK]

Is it possible to render out a quad wireframe instead of tri's yet?

Out of pure curiosity, what advantage would you get from quads or tri's ?

Martin

[guest84672]

No because KeyShot doesn't show quads, only triangles.

[Jesse.Art]

Out of pure curiosity, what advantage would you get from quads of tri's ?

Martin

Not necessarily advantageous but rather a personal preference. I find the tri's wireframe to be a bit more dense than I like.

[Jesse.Art]

No because KeyShot doesn't show quads, only triangles.

Yeah, I was hoping somebody had figured out a way.

[TpwUK]

Out of pure curiosity, what advantage would you get from quads of tri's ?

Martin

Not necessarily advantageous but rather a personal preference. I find the tri's wireframe to be a bit more dense than I like.

That's what i was trying to get to, was it for personal taste or something more technical. You could possibly create a new material that was a wireframe type of material but designed not to show the diagonal lines of the mesh, or maybe KeyShot can add one for a future release. I must admit the nice smooth looking quads display you get when working in SubD packages do look much better to the eye

Martin

[DriesV]

There is a way to render quad wireframes in KeyShot.
It requires a model with planar quad faces to work.

Here are the steps:

• Import model with planar quads.
• Completely unsmooth normals (Edit Geometry > Edit Normals > Minimum Edge Angle = 0° > Calculate Vertex Normals).
• Assign Toon material.
• Set very low Contour Angle for the Toon material.

I attached a simple example scene and rendering.

Dries

[DriesV]

It works on dense meshes too.

Dries

[TpwUK]

Nice examples, are they NURBs or Polygons ? I suspect the former since KS always triangulates polygons

Martin

[DriesV]

Nice examples, are they NURBs or Polygons ? I suspect the former since KS always triangulates polygons

Martin

Polygons. The trick lies in using the Toon material. The Toon shader doesn't apply a contour line if the angle between two faces is 0 deg. So eventhough there are still triangles, the Toon material makes the model look like a quad mesh.

If you import planar quad meshes, then each quad will be converted into 2 planar triangles.

Dries

[DriesV]

In general, this technique creates cleaner looking meshes when compared to the regular Wireframe material. Especially for models that have a lot of planar geometry.
Left = Toon / Right = Wireframe

Dries

[Jesse.Art]

There is a way to render quad wireframes in KeyShot.
It requires a model with planar quad faces to work.

Here are the steps:

• Import model with planar quads.
• Completely unsmooth normals (Edit Geometry > Edit Normals > Minimum Edge Angle = 0° > Calculate Vertex Normals).
• Assign Toon material.
• Set very low Contour Angle for the Toon material.

I attached a simple example scene and rendering.

Dries

Much appreciated but I still get tons of triangles throughout the mesh.

[Jesse.Art]

It appears that I don't have all planar quads. Is there a way to achieve this without triangulating them in Maya?

[TpwUK]

In general, this technique creates cleaner looking meshes when compared to the regular Wireframe material. Especially for models that have a lot of planar geometry.
Left = Toon / Right = Wireframe

Dries

Excellent examples, and certainly a method I will have to look at. I couldn't tell that the torus was a poly mesh :/

Martin

[Jesse.Art]

I found a solution that works for me. I simply exported the UV map image from Maya's UV Editor and brought it into Photoshop where I prepped the image as a texture and applied it to a KS material.

Perfecto