[3Ds Max] best way to optomize just keep the shell of object/get rid of the verts inside

IEatModels

I was making a rope and realized that there are a ton of unused polys and verts inside of the center of it. If this was say.. zBrush, I would know all the polys and verts were just on the surface.

What is the best way to convert delete the unneeded stuff on the inside that is never seen without taking it to zbrush or what ever? I first thought select all the verts and weld the the overlapping with a high threshold but realized there would still be a lot of unused stuff in the inside even after that.

THANKS IN ADVANCE!

Mark Dygert

I'm not sure I fully understand the structure of the model or what you're trying to but I'll take a stab at solving the problem and maybe it will help.

If you delete or detach the end caps and will it leave you with two separate elements? Can you then select the inner element and delete it? Then weld the end caps back on if you need them?

Or do you mean there are cylinders twisting around each other with a lot of unseen / unnecessary verts? That's a little more difficult to solve, but I have a few ideas, they take a bit of explaining so I won't get into them unless that's what you mean.

IEatModels

hey thanks mark, I meant it as more of a general question for objects that have a lot of verts/polys on the inside that are inside the object and not really affecting the outside geometry.

I don't want to limit the answer to this one object but for a simple rope, I took a cylinder and duplicated it 4x overlapping inside itself. In typing this I just realized the inside verts will still kind of dictate what the outside looks like even though they are inside. So like you said it would be very difficult to clean that up.

I guess I was thinking about how if I took it inside say zBrush, I could get just the outer shell's topology and was wondering if there was a way to do that without leaving 3Ds Max. It would be great if there was a modifier 3Ds Max that could do that.

thanks!

monster

Have you tried ProBoolean?

musashidan

There is no automatic method for this, unless you are modeling planar and using a shell mod for thickness. That way you can set the inner shell faces ID and recall it as a selection for deletion once you've collapsed the stack.

Your rope example geo, as you've discovered yourself, certainly would have to be manually deleted due its very nature(unless you use @monster's clever method)

Or similarly you could Dynamesh/Zremesh in ZB.(or just Zremesh the proboolean)

pixaeiro

I would try something like this:
- Use a texture baking tool to bake ambient occlusion to the vertex colors.
- Select all vertices that are black.
- Invert the selection and grow it once (so we don't delete faces that have one black vertex).
- Delete.