# Simplifying cell data - quadrilateral to triangle elements

**URL:** https://discourse.paraview.org/t/simplifying-cell-data-quadrilateral-to-triangle-elements/5386
**Category:** ParaView Support
**Created:** [September 19, 2020, 2:20pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/simplifying-cell-data-quadrilateral-to-triangle-elements/5386 "2020-09-19T14:20:02Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![whophil](https://discourse.paraview.org/user_avatar/discourse.paraview.org/whophil/32/2934_2.png) [@whophil](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/whophil)
#### Post date: [September 19, 2020, 2:20pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/simplifying-cell-data-quadrilateral-to-triangle-elements/5386/1 "2020-09-19T14:20:02Z")

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I have a surface mesh consisting of quadrilateral cells. Each quad is actually a triangle with one point repeated (three unique vertices). I’d like to simplify this so that each cell is represented as a triangle element. Is there a filter in ParaView or VTK to do this? I have tried `CleantoGrid` and `CleanCellstoGrid`, neither of which seem to have worked.

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### Author: ![mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/user_avatar/discourse.paraview.org/mwestphal/32/17_2.png) [@mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/mwestphal)
#### Post date: [September 23, 2020, 12:41pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/simplifying-cell-data-quadrilateral-to-triangle-elements/5386/2 "2020-09-23T12:41:01Z")

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Triangulate ? Tetrahedralize ?