How to export muscle geo as quads?

[seven6ty]

So I tried creating muscles in the Sculpt room, and export them back to Maya.  But they came in triangulated.  I read that I would have to export them through the Retopo room, but they still came out triangles.  I also read that I'd need to run a retopo on them, so I tried a few automatic tools, but it just seemed to make them worse, I didn't really want to specify an arbitrary number of polygons to end up with.  I've got dozens of muscle tubes to export, and I didn't really want to have to manually retopologize each one.  And I like the number of polys and the edge flow, so I didn't want to mess that up.  I just wanted to get rid of the diagonal edges.

The light brown lines are the original muscles I created.  The green, blue and pink were after running AUTOPO -> AUTOPO, Instant Meshes (auto), and Old-style quadrangulation.  They look horrible though.  They all had options to set the final poly count, but I don't know what exact number I want, and I don't want anything to change, other than the diagonal connecting lines.

Any clue on what I need to do to get these as clean quads?  I couldn't find any tutorials on exporting muscles.  They all involve exporting with a specific number of polys with the auto topology tools, or manually drawing detail onto complex shapes, involving a lot more work than it seems like elongated spheres should be.

[Carlosan]

Hi

Export as Projected Quads will help.

 

[digman]

You can try what Carlson said, though I rarely had good success with Exporting as Quads.  Your experience could be different.

Autopo with the right settings can be fast and do a fairly good job.  Your muscles are not a complex shape. 

My Autopo settings and the result. It was only a matter of seconds to create the autopo retopo mesh. 

 

[seven6ty]

Okay, that's kind of what I was afraid of.  With dozens of shapes, having to try a bunch of settings, for each one, a bunch of times, it's almost as efficient to just manually retopo them by hand.  I'm really pretty shocked, as I had expected these to be UVed quads from the get go.  Because, they're just elongated spheres.  But like many things in 3D Coat, I guess I shouldn't have expected it to be that easy.  :-/ 

[seven6ty]

Oh, and on a related note, does anyone know if it's possible to make only certain objects be wireframe?  I know the hotkeys for changing everything wireframed, and I know that you can ghost certain objects, but I haven't been able to figure out how to set one thing to be wireframe, and everything else solid, smooth shaded.

[digman]

Those are my general settings for most objects except the number of polygons.  If you can share your file by pm, I can check on a method for you that is faster. It is worth a try I believe.

I even run autopo on several non symmetrical objects at once but the models are not complicated.