Wish: ReduceMesh control for render meshes

I’m amazed at the great results I get from the ReduceMesh command. It’s really helpful and provides great control to reduce the poly count of mesh models. It seems to do a much better job than the Maya command.

It would be so great to have this sort of control over RenderMeshes. I find with every project I quickly hit a point that my display gets sluggish due to the amount of objects in my scene. It is easily the No.1 issue that affects my productivity within Rhino. I have played around with custom mesh settings, and even with McNeel support, Can’t get the render meshes down to a point I’m happy with.

If we had control over rendermeshes like in the ReduceMesh dialog (ie, display the number of faces, reduce the face count by % or number) I reckon I could manage my models much better. IMO, that and having more efficient render meshes to start with would be a great improvement for Rhino.

A

1 Like

I will add it to the list. I think it’s a pretty good idea.

Try this - MaxMeshPolygons.rhp (43 KB)

This is pretty basic - but it basically does what you want. Hopefully you will be able to use it to tell me whether this is going to work for you.

You can limit the polygon count of any object by running the “MaxMeshPolygons” command on it. You will enter the max number of trianglular faces, or “0” if you want to stop the limitation.

If an object’s render mesh hits the face limit, Rhino will run ReduceMesh on the render mesh until its face count is the same as or lower than the limit.

  • Andy

BTW - this is for 64-bit Rhino 5 only.

Cool. Seems to work :wink:

Nit-picking:

  • The command line doesn’t echo back to ‘Command:’
  • When extracting the render mesh after having run this one, it seems like the operation is done over again one more time. Is that expected?

Nope - like I said, this is “quick and dirty” at the moment. I’ll clean it up if people find it useful.

  • Andy

Hi Andy,
Thanks! I can see this being really useful!

Is it possible to get a face count when selecting an object? That would be helpful to gauge how much to reduce the mesh by.

Also, it would be totally awesome to have a global setting in a file to ensure no object ever hits the set limit.

A

Use ‘PolygonCount’.