select occluded geometry

[super gnu]

ive got models from a client with 10's of thousands of objects.. probably the majority of them are inside the model and will never be visible.

max doesnt like it at all.


it would be great if there was a way to select all these internal objects and delete them.

model is extremely complex shape so manually selecting ( apart from it talking 1-2 mins to do a selection) is a non-starter..

i found a script which renders a dome of cameras with scanline and selects based on pixel coverage, but a) its slow, b) it didnt work at all.


is there something that could be done with vray... ? a clever way to do it i dont know about?

any suggestions?

[Alex_M]

Did you ask the the client if they can get the people that made the models to delete these for you? Maybe they worked with layers so it might be possible for them to easily delete the internal parts for you. You can explain to them that it is nearly impossible to work with the model in its current form that they've delivered to you.

[super gnu]

no unfortunately the models come from a custom piece of software that works with prebuilt modules.. they have no way to manually edit the geometry at all..

[Morne]

wont it be quciker to select the bits you do need, then stick it on a new layer (and make that layer current)
then switch off all other layers. That way you dont need to do an invert selection and wait 10 years for max to respond

You can then also save out only that layer selection to a new file, and open the file, which should now be faster and smaller as it does not contain all the other junk