In this paper, a general framework of practical two-dimensional quadrilateral remeshing, which includes the determination of remeshing time, automatic quadrilateral mesh generation, and data transfer process, will be formulated. In particular, the current work contains new algorithms of mesh density specification according to the distribution of effective strain-rate gradients, mesh density smoothing by fast Fourier transform (FFT) and low-pass filtering techniques, coarsening it by node placement scheme, and a modified Laplacian mesh smoothing technique. The efficiency of the developed remeshing scheme was tested through three practical two-dimensional metal forming simulations. The results clearly indicate that the algorithms proposed in this study make it possible to simulate two-dimensional metal forming problems efficiently and automatically. Copyright (C) 2002 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.