imported .3ds mesh splits all quads to triangles

I discovered that many architectural and furniture sites provide 3D-Models of their products. I get that they are generally not made for blender but their provide formats blender supports.

I can choose between .3ds, .dwg, .dxf, .ogrp and .vcs for a certain object to download. I’m going for .3ds since thats the only format blender supports here.

When I import it, it all looks fine. But in edit mode each quad got split by an edge to a triangle. And I’m sure the models orginally didn’t have that.

Is there a solution to this problem and a easy way to fix that?

Here’s an example of an important mesh. Would give me alot of work to dissolve all this edges by hand


.3DS is a horribly outdated and severely limited format - and one of its limitations is that it is tris only. Sorry!

You can try to select all and hit Alt-J (Tris to Quads).

Okay, that’s bad :smiley:

Alt J does lot of the work. Thank for that.

But if 3ds is such a bad format, why does blender not support other file formats I listed? I find an addon for .dxf files, but I guess this one is still in development and doesn’t work.

But if 3ds is such a bad format, why does blender not support other file formats I listed?
Maybe you should ask the site where you get the files why they don’t support the almost universal .obj format which does support quads

And something to also notice is that some of that CAD file formats might very well not be 3D model data, but rather 2D architectural symbols for room planning…