I don’t know anything about coding, but here is a question.
Is it possible to create a script which automatically creates faces for connected edges? The current system of using Shift F produces awful faces. I was wondering if it was possible to select an edge, run a script which does something like conway’s game of life, expanding the selection and looking for unfilled areas which could be filled with a quad and finally stopping if there is no more areas available. This is how I basically fill faces manually, anyway. Is it possible?
I guess it might be possible to do something along the lines of that. But man… It would be akin to programming robotic vision to determine how to fill in the faces. Just a quick impression of it is that the logic would be nearly impossible.
I think something more along the lines of finding the nearest points and creating a face from that would be simpler and possibly better looking. I’m not sure how Blender does its discovery though.
For unconnected verts, Blender forms a quad by “trying out” various combinations of vertex-orders (of four selected verts), and then testing the convexity of each.
or something like that.
joeedh
I was just hoping that there might be a way to connect them in a more orderly manner, maximizing the quads and arranging them neatly. Sort of like what you would try to do if you were to do it manually. Shift F, Alt F, Alt J is the way I do it now, but it still needs a lot of tweaking afterwards.
Filling irregular polygons with faces is not so complex, holes add some complication. Look at the last posting on this thread:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=352043#352043
So how about a script that stops when it hits a problem area? I was hoping for a semi-automated way of filling faces. Like select an edge, run the script. The script makes quads, either by its own or step by step via push button, until it hits an area where only tris can be made, or the available option forks out or runs out. Then you start the process again. Something controllable, rather than shift F, which more often than not gives you results you don’t want. Can it be done?
That’s a good idea… I’d much rather have a function that shows me the problem so that I can fix it in stead of fixing it for me.
Should be as easy as putting the face function in a “try” thingy???
Have you actually experimented with filling simple stuff yet?
Manually filling faces, yes. It’s tedious, but you get the results you’re after. A semi-automated process would help a lot. But as I stated, one look at codes and I go to sleep… 
.
Here’s something to try. Create a plane, subdivide it a few times so you have a grid composed of say 10x10 faces. Now delete a row of 5 or 6 faces inside. Alt click an edge on the hole so that the edges around the hole is selected. Do a shift F. Most likely, the fill would not resemble the original neat arrangement of squares. Alt F and Alt J would clean it up somewhat, but it wouldn’t produce anything like what you would do if you were to do it manually. But if the filling process allows you to choose which edge to start with, it would fill it up with nice orderly squares.