Hi Dale,
I’m sorry, but I really can’t agree with your conclusions. The render mesh settings in the file are not in any way, shape or form what I would call ‘extremely heavy’ - I have used variants on this for years and never experienced anything like what’s happening in the file posted above.
If you zoom way in on one of the corners of one of the object’s extracted render mesh, you see this:
There’s nothing in the above settings that should make this happen. The triangles there have a short edge length of only 0.002 and a long edge length of almost 12mm. That’s an aspect ratio of almost 6000 - not 6.0
None of the objects have a custom mesh applied…
Plus, if you re-read the first post, converting the extrusions into polysurfaces without changing the file’s meshing settings makes a MUCH lighter mesh - of the density that I would expect to find with those settings (for example around 110K polys as opposed to 2.7 million).
Certainly, the mesh could be made lighter and still work well, mainly by eliminating the aspect ratio setting, which would bring the 110K polys down to about 3K polys if it’s a polysurface and only about 700 if it stays an extrusion. But that doesn’t explain the problem with the original having 2.7 million.
The aspect ratio setting is clearly at fault here - at least one other poster has had the same experience.