I’m using blender 2.56a and am creating a mesh for use in realtime. The game engine I’m using (Unity) happens to be triangulating the mesh in a way I dislike. One of the quads is getting split one way, the the quad on the facing side the oposite way. I was going to fix this by simply splitting those faces into tris the way I want.
Problem is I can’t for the life of me figure out how to do this. In just about any other 3D app I have used I would be able to select two vertices and add a split or cut between them. Is there any way to do this in blender? The knife tool is retarded because it adds all kinds of extra vertices and edges. I don’t want to delete the face and add in two in its place because I would have to redo the UV map.
Note that when you split a single edge you will get triangles. Blender can currently only use faces with 3 or four edges. You have to live within this limitation. If you just want to simply split an edge use w / subdivide, but again you will get extra triangles.
Show a screenshot of your mesh or attach a blend file, you may get a more constructive answer if we can see exactly what you are trying to achieve.
Alright I have now added some visual aid to help explain my problem. Below is an image, the top half is a screen shot from the game engine, below a screen shot of the mesh in blender. If you look at the top half you will see two arrows, these point out the edges the game engine is adding when triangulating the mesh (game engines take all polygones down to triangles because they are the fastest to process).
You will notice it is doing the triangulation differently on the two sides. The green arrow indicates the better looking triangulation, the red indicates the ugly looking triangulation. To fix this problem I was going to go ahead and triangulate these faces (the better looking way) in blender.
So all I wanted to do is add a split or cut to the selected face (in the lower screenshot), indicated by the orange line I have drawn. You will note that this edge would go between two existing vertices so no extra geometry would need to be added to any other part of the mesh. I have not found a way to do this yet. In maya for example I could just select the two vertices and have it add an edge between them.
I understand that I could delete the face, and in its place add two faces to end up with the same affect. The problem then is that I would need to UV map these two “new” faces. The advantage to splitting the current face is that the UV map for the original face would be split to accommodate the two faces that now exist in its place.
Thanks a ton guys, Guiseppe’s solution was just what I needed! I’m lovin 2.5, only thing I miss is support for my 3D mouse! So consider me a happy 2.5er!