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Quad Draw Tool overview

 
 
 

To open the Quad Draw tool, click the Quad Draw button in the Modeling Toolkit window.

Artists can model in a natural and organic way, directly in Maya, using Quad Draw. The Quad Draw tool offers a streamlined, one-tool workflow for retopologizing meshes. The manual retopology process lets you create clean meshes while preserving the shape of your reference surface.

See Retopology, Retopologize a mesh with Quad Draw, and Quad Draw hotkeys.

Note Your reference surface can be a polygon mesh, NURBS surface, or construction plane. See Set a live surface.

Quad Draw Options

Overlay Append Mesh

When enabled, new topology created with the Quad Draw tool overlays the reference surface. The edges of the new topology are thicker than the reference surface's wireframe, making it easier to distinguish between the two meshes. You can change the color of the edges by clicking the color swatch.

Auto-weld

When enabled, the Quad Draw tool automatically welds adjacent vertices and edges. Auto-weld can be used with Quad Draw Extend options and Quad Draw tweak mode to prevent overlapping components on your Quad Draw mesh.

You can adjust the slider to set the tolerance of the weld operation. For example, if the Auto-weld tolerance is set to 10, any components that are 10 pixels or less apart are merged. You can also enable Auto-weld in the Quad Draw tool marking menu.

ImportantAuto-weld has no effect when Soft Selection is enabled.
Relax

Lets you even out the spacing between the vertices of a Quad Draw mesh. See Relax vertices with Quad Draw.

NoteYou can also select the following options from Quad Draw tool marking menu.
Auto-Lock
Uses the location of the cursor to determine which vertices (interior vertices or border vertices) to lock. When you start to relax border vertices, the relax brush automatically locks interior vertices. When you start to relax interior vertices, the relax brush automatically locks border vertices. This is the default option.
Interior vertices
Locks border vertices so they remain in the same position while you relax interior vertices.
Border vertices
Locks interior vertices so they remain in the same position while you relax border vertices.

NoteYou can relax borders when Border vertices or All vertices is enabled. Border vertices produces a slightly different result, because it only averages the weights of border vertices.

All vertices
The relax brush affects all vertices.
Extend

Lets you extend the edges of a Quad Draw mesh to create new polygons. See Extend edges with Quad Draw.

NoteYou can also select the following options from the Quad Draw tool marking menu.
Edge
Extends a single edge of a Quad Draw mesh.
TipWhen Edge is selected, you can also drag vertices to create new polygons.
Loop
Extends an edge loop of a Quad Draw mesh.
Border
Extends the border of a Quad Draw mesh.

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