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