How to fix bad triangulation?

When exporting Sketchup models to render in other applications, I noticed the triangulation of those models is not very good. Most of the time, Sketchup creates very thin triangles which result in rendering issues in those other applications.

Is there an easy way to see these triangles within Sketchup? Selecting Hidden Geometry does not show these triangles.

Is there a way to edit or manually re-triangulate these objects in Sketchup?

What format are you exporting? I generally use CleanUp to get imported geometry looking better.

The results are the same regardless of the export format as the geometry is generated by Sketchup.

What program are you exporting to? Some programs make automatic triangulation, sketchup doesn’t make triangles when a face is coplanar and you can have ngons without any issue, if you’re exporting to a software like blender and your model wasn’t modeled using quads, blender will create triangles on faces with more than three vertices, cause blender modeling is different than sketchup’s and it needs to have quads or triangles if it can’t detect quads. You can fix it by making your model using quads, there’s a plugin that helps you to make models with quads, it’s called quadfacetools, it’s free, it has a newer feature on the overlays if you activate it, it shows with green color the Quads, purple for triangles and red for Ngons.

Exporting as FBX seems to produce better results in terms of the triangulation where it seems to respect the faces better whereas the SKP file seems to ignore the faces unless different materials are assigned to each of those.

I’ll give QuadFaceTools another try to see if that might work better.

P.S. I think QuadFaceTools appears to produce better triangulation because the Live Mesh Analysis appears to assign different material to those faces which in turn changes affects the triangulation.

If you use the overlays, no materials are applied.

How do you enable this overlay feature?

Go to window/default trays and activate the overlays.