Cropping a large model

Support Basics & Interface
1

Hi All

I’m very new to Blender (24 hours) and been digesting all the YouTube videos I can but…

I have a generated model from an imported OBJ file which contains 1.5 million surfaces. I’d like to crop the object to a simple area in the centre, probably less than 10% of the original, but my 16Gig, i7, SSD laptop struggles to cope whenever I select Edit Mode.

Does anyone have any hints or tips please? Any way I can roughly pre-crop the model and then edit it?

Thanks,
Tim

2

1.5 million faces are a vast amount of geometry…

As far as I know the only way is to manually crop them in edit mode (as you tried)…
However you can perform this procedure first to get rid of unnecessary faces & doubled geometry:

  • go to editmode (TAB)
  • select everything (A) [this will probably take some time]
  • press W and select “remove doubles” (I am sure you can guess what this does)
  • then press X and select “limited dissolve”. This will delete/combine all faces which can be grouped to larger ones

Now blender should be able to handle your object quicker - at least a little bit - and you will hopefully be able to delete (X or DEL) unnecessary geometry with the selection tools (B or C)…

3

Thanks LukeV1. That worked and took the count down to < 500,000. No problem editing now. Thanks again, Tim