Triangulating screwes up my meshes.

[psyonic]

Hello all. I'm having a problem I hope someone can help me with. I'm giving my first steps in Maya and i'm trying to create a triangulated mesh from curves I export from Illustrtator.
After I have imported my curves from ilustrator and bevel them, I go to Polygons>Triangulate. The problem is that Maya seems to do whatever it wants with my mesh. It simply creates edges wherever it wants and screwes up my geometry. For instance it makes my flat faces concave, makes my perfect curves look screwy. If I quadrangulate instead I don't have that problem, only when I triangulate.
I hope this makes sense to anyone.

[laxman]

Maya's triangulate function is a bit wanky, hasn't been changed since the early versions.

What kind of object are you trying to triangulate? Maya does a fine job unless you have faces which have more that 4 sides. For example, if you had text a did a bevel plus on them, it would two faces on each letter which have many edges and so the triangulate won't work. If that is the case, i'd suggest selecting all the faces on the side, the ones which have four sides and triangulating them. Then triangulate the large faces with more than 4 sides by hand.

You could also try looking on highend3d.com for a triangulate script, there's bound to be one floating around somewhere.

[psyonic]

I thank you for your reply.
When you say triangulate by hand, do you mean creating splits in the shape of a triangle by using the "split polygon tool"? What I'm trying to do is export my geometry into another program that only takes "triangulated polygon meshes", so I'm unsure of how to do it by hand so said program reads it correctly.
Thanks again.

[laxman]

When I say by hand, I mean use the split poly tool. But just now I got another idea. Select the faces that have more than 4 sides, or the ones that are causing problems. Extract them from the main object, so that each face is its own object. Then try running the triangulate on each piece separetly. If that works, then you just have to recombine and merge verts.

[psyonic]

OK, I got it.
Your advices were of much help. Thank you very much.

[accelerator]

this regarding importing of OBJ files to Maya....recently im using sketchup as my fast way of architectural modeling. i group them before exporting it in obj file. but when i imported the OBJ file to Maya all my circular faces and edges seems to triangulates. ive tried importing the dwg file ( which i exported from sketchup) into 3ds max and all faces works perfect without triangulation. and when i exported it in OBJ file ( still using 3dsmax), i check out Maya as my reference for exporting OBJ, and still when i import it in Maya the faces still triangulates....

another process i did is (same model as i have in 3ds max) i exported it as OBJ using Cinema 4d reference, and i imported it in cinema 4d, all works fine without the triangulation.... in 3dsMax and cinema 4d, what you see in sketchup is all the same in those 2 apps..... but why in maya they always triangulates?....

is there any solution from my problem....thanks..this would be of great help for Maya user like me...cause i done all my texturing and animation in Maya... i just mostly model in sketchup for architectural purposes..

please help me....