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Can anyone suggest a tool or modeller that will allow me to "gridify" a model? Let me explain what I mean by that

Imagine that I model a simple n-gon, over a plane (say, like a floor outline/plant) - beware, coder ASCII art below:



If I were to gridify it, by suppling a X and Y stride, it would produce a mesh something like



Like if I was grid cookie-cutting the whole thing. Does anyone understand what I mean?

If so, can you suggest something that will do this? A freeware tool like an extension to blender or whatever would be best, of course.

Many thanks in advance!

You can do that two ways using Wings 3D. The first being to just select all of the verts on the object and pressing the connect button (or c), but that wont make a square grid, that'l just connect all of the verts in the shortest way possible. The other way would be to manually cut each side into the amount of verts needed and gridisize it yourself, which Im sure isnt what you're looking for.

If you're looking for something to triangulate models, Im pretty sure blender does that, if not, download Deep Exploration's trial demo (from Right Hemisphere) and convert the model to any mesh type you want (even if it's a 3DS file and you convert it to a 3DS file, it'll still triangulate).

Other than that Ive not heard of it being done, probably because it isnt fairly logical, it increases the polycount for no reason, as triangles are smaller but can achieve the same effect.

Also, in Wings 3D, if you autosmooth the model first, and then click the smooth button, the object will increase in polygons without losing it's shape. Might help.

- RUC'

Thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately I don't just want to "fill" an outline with the polys, as that can be easily done with blender for instance. Neither do I want to triangulate a filled n-gon, as that is fairly common and doable too.

I really want an orthogonal grid out of an outline/n-gon. And, you're right, this apparently doesn't make much sense as it increases the polycount with no obvious advantage. That is until you know what I need it for.

You see, it's not for rendering, it's for making a navigational mesh out of a floorplan. And for the particular algorithm I have to work best, the nav areas should be as regular and as close in size to each other as possible. So, really, a "tile" layout over an outline would be the best option. Hence the quad gridify request...