Face Culling

Hey guys. I am using 2.49, and making a template of pieces that can be used to build maps for a game that I am also making. This template will eventually become a full-blown map-editor, but for now I have a few people on our dev team using blender to make maps this way, assembling the pieces (sort of like legos) and whatnot to build some quick beta maps. As you can imagine, building large meshes out of smaller meshes does not exactly produce an efficient facecount-to-actual-geometry ratio. I needed a way to remove the unseen faces for now, since I am not yet sure if our engine will cull unseen geometry automatically or not. So this is the process I’ve come up with so far…

1) Edit mode/solid drawtype/occluded background geometry
2) Drag-select all visible faces, edges, or verts (depending on the geometry).
3) “P” to separate the visible geometry from the background geometry.
4) Delete the background geometry.

I looked around the internet, and it turns out the little process I’ve come up with is already widely considered one of the “ideal” methods. It really does work well. The one drawback is that if the map gets too complex, and I have to do step 2 above, it is sometimes very hard to get an angle on some of the faces/edges/verts, and I end up missing some a few times. Not to mention it can be a tedious process sometimes. I have instead been doing these steps as I go, usually before each chunk of map gets too complex, but I would like a simpler way.

My question is this: Is there a way to improve on the 2nd step? I really WISH I could hit “A” and just select-all faces… but when I try this, it ends up also selecting the background geometry, even though it is occluded. Is there a way to select only non-occluded geometry? Or if anyone has a better method, please let me know. I am fairly new to Blender still, and it is possible that just yet have something to learn.

Thanks

as I told you in the other thread, you can certainly skip the seperating step and delete the geometry right away.

You could try Select->Select Manifold for step 2 but I’m afraid, in YOUR case it wont be of much help… It’ll most likely simply select everything.
(It basically selects bad geometry and an internal web-like geometry could be considered “bad”…)

Maybe somebody could come up with a fancy little script that does that, however, functionality like this is far away from trivial. It probably wouldn’t be so hard if you just had to delete geometry unseen from a single view but overally finding out about the occluded geometry from any angle… :-/

The main reason I had them separate the geometry is so they know they have the right mesh selected and so they know they have done the step correctly, remember we are dealing with newbs!

Thanks though, I will ask my programmer if he has time to do some script editing