I initially thought I understood the OP’s request, but subsequent posts have left me uncertain. I believe we’ve now seen three distinct interpretations offered that are quite different both in their meaning and in the way one would handle them.
First is what I read initially: the user has marked various things as currently uninteresting either by setting their hidden flag or by assigning a non-visible layer to them. Now the user wants to go the next step by actually deleting them. This operation would be easy to code.
Second is a sort of “outer shell” idea in which things inside other solids would be suppressed, leaving only the enclosing skin. Unlike the first idea, this does not presume any prior action to designate what will be erased. This operation should be feasible to code but is more complex than the first and much more likely to have nasty corner cases because SketchUp allows distinct entities to overlap in space.
Third is visibility: suppress things that aren’t seen from the current camera because something is between them and the camera. This would require ray-testing all over the view, which is normally handled by the graphics but would have to be emulated by the CPU. It would likely be quite expensive computation when done using Ruby and would have issues about what to do with things that are partially obscured. I suspect (hope) this is not what the OP meant!
…for every scene, before culling any…
there are a couple of old scripts that do it for a single view, but they were slow and error prone…
john
sorry, I think I’ve confused you all enough now! As a user & not at all savvy regards the actual possibilities of creating an extension that would do what I need, i think I’ve overlooked the complicated process that would be involved.
Box had it spot on with leaving just a simple skin made out of only the faces that are seen by camera, eradicating all unnecessary lines, faces, groups, components… everything… in one go. Even exploding the whole model in the process would be ok as it would be saved as a separate model which is uncomplicated/light & speeding up the animation process when clients viewing a walk through of kitchen… as well as pan & zoom etc. I’m beginning to confuse myself now!
@neil_hallesy, you don’t get if you don’t ask…
I have an extension ‘under development’ that does 80% of what [ I think ] your asking, but you have to select a cubic volume for it to run…
if you can PM me a sample model, I’ll see if it works and post a gif…
john
Hi John,
Believe it or not, I have never uploaded a model to share so not sure how I do that?
If it is no bigger than 3MB you can upload it directly into a post either by clicking the upload button at the top of the reply edit window (7 th from left) or drag-and-drop into the window. If it is larger, you must upload it to a file sharing site such as the 3D warehouse, DropBox, etc. and provide the link in a post here.
Thanks Steve.
John, I uploaded model to warehouse under the title “Shaker kitchen with wood block worktops” I’ts one of my smaller models but still 43mb?
got it, it only dropped it by 4.5MB but I’ll see if I can find some time to improve on that…
a.t.m it only vanishes the hidden bits…
john
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So you are wanting to skin your kitchen geometry to speed up animations.
I like @simoncbevans suggestion of putting all unseen geometry on layers that are then hidden which speeds up animation, partly for the general advantage of having organised models - if you are in the habit of organising your layers this way, it doesn’t take so much time. There may be other presentation advantages to this as well.
Apart from an extension to do this (which may create issues that also need to be resolved), another option is upgrading your hardware, budget permitting.
Thanks John, appreciated.
Upgrading hardware would definitely help but where do you draw the line? I’m pretty good at organising my layers but ultimately they’re still there making model heavy. Just wondered if there was a clever extension that you could one click & leave only outer faces.
Not sure if it has exactly the functionality you require, but have you explored the latest real-time rendering from Lumion or Vray?
Have looked at pretty much every renderer on the market. Lumion looks perfect but overkill for kitchen only purposes? trying to choose one that is user friendly enough for someone like me with no experience in rendering to use has blown my mind on numerous occasions. I really should just commit to one & dive in but always feel i’m gonna waste alot of time learning the wrong one. I don’t think I’m alone after reading a lot of other threads?
I haven’t looked into the details, but the real-time rendering (just out in the latest versions) may really speed up your animations. VRay and Lumion do prefer high spec hardware.
I haven’t done much testing of either, but I think Lumion would be easier to learn - very simple interface.
There would no doubt be many business considerations.
Creatively, learning rendering can be a valuable discovery process, seeing form and texture realistically improves our understanding of the designs we develop.
There are threads here where many have contributed with their favourite render software - I think most would agree Lumion and VRay are market leaders in terms of quality output.
Trials are obviously helpful in evaluation.
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I have been thinking about Lumion for a good while. Vray seems to be one of the most popular for sketchup but also looks like Hard work for a complete render novice. Lumion definitely looks more user friendly which is why it has the price tag i spose… May just bite the bullet see.
I actually lost 30MB by making some textures unique [your screen grabs], removing the cupboard internal fitting, but leaving the carcass’s…
I also removed the Section Cuts and painted the Room Group transparent, and the Interior Wall faces your color…
I do this a lot for small set designs, where the camera can be anywhere [our walls are removable]…
john
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John was that all manual editing, or the result of an extension? The point of my question isn’t to challenge your results, rather to emphasize ways that the OP could achieve his goal using built in methods without a massive amount of effort - which is always worth learning!
That’s great John, didn’t realise you could make one side of a face transparent & leave other side painted… very handy! I only managed to lose a couple of MB’s by deleting all behind doors etc so your tips are much appreciated. Did your extension manage to do anything with this or is model to disconnected?
and @neil_hallesy,
without adjusting my extension, it was struggling more than it should, so I thought I’d do a quick manual tidy up first…
that was so easy to loose masses of crud, I haven’t gone back to looking at the extension yet…
your model is ‘basically’ well organised with the exception some over zealous nesting and the massive screen grabs that only use a fragment…
it’s one of the few cases when I paint ‘groups’…
great for presenting, but it can be annoying while modelling unless you switch off the groups layer visibility…
john
That’s a cool effect. I shall try to remember that one.