unnecessary faces removal feature
Why, you may ask? Well, this idea originally came from having a problem with an addon. The addon is called "Block Blender," and what it can do is, through Geometry Nodes, convert any mesh into Minecraft blocks, which is helpful for Minecraft animations.
For example, take the humble Ico-sphere:
After the addon does its thing, it becomes this (also, it was scaled, but that's not important):
After this, if I open Edit mode and delete some faces, you can see the non-helpful faces in the middle of it:
Another way to show this is to go into wireframe mode:
I have tried to select the outer faces, but every time I do, the inner faces that are connected to the outer faces via their edges also end up being selected, which becomes very time-consuming.
I have also tried everything on the select panel, but they all simply did not work — as in, they did not select only the outer/external faces for me to delete.
Yes, this may seem unimportant, but this problem magnifies greatly with scale for larger builds.
ButI must stress, if a button or feature were added that could either only select the outer or inner faces for the user to delete, or it just automatically removes them, it would go far beyond this and could prove useful for modelers. It would be a very good quality of life feature.
10 Comments
You should take this request to the addon creator, whose addon is creating cubes you don't want.
I mean the Idea came from the problem with the addon but this could be great for staff beyond this especially for modelers who could use it to remove faces they dont need for performance it would be great for people using blender to make game characters.
I also think that blender should have more features that are very specific and community benefiting like this. not that the talented team of blender devs have not already made an incredible software, But these kinds of features make blender stand out thanks to thier commitment to listening to the community and finding features that would be overlooked by other more monopolistic softwares.
I think you're missing my overall point, which is that the proper modeling technique is to not create a mass of geometry you don't want in the first place.
The issue here is that, on the surface, Blender has many ways to do what you say. But it can't have one tool that just "gets rid of unnecessary faces".
The first reason is because "unnecessary faces" does not have a universal definition.
Proof here is in the way your tool generates geometry by duplicating cubes, because, well... It's an addon for doing Minecraft stuff: cubes will be moved around, removed, added again, so it needs whole cubes! There are no "unnecessary faces" in that context.
The second reason, there are many ways to do all kinds of "cleaning up the inside of a mesh" already. One of which I detailed in my other comment.
But all those ways have their own sets of requirements and outputs that may or may not be available to you (or require extra steps, like merging by distance to avoid overlapping mesh).
Your specific scenario of how you got where you are now, and what you need as an end result, affects the tools you can or can't use.
Here you start from duplicated cubes, so lots of overlaping geometry and different normal directions that might be hard to deal with for some operators. And you want to keep only the outer faces, but do you needto perfectly preserve the cubes' outer mesh or an aproximation like slightly beveled edges is also fine? Do you need to preserve the edges between each face like it's still actual cubes on the outside? Do you need to preverse any existing UVs or will you make new ones anyway? And so on...
All these things impact what "unnecessary faces" mean, but also what "necessary things" are, and how you would deal with them.
This also loops back to, why not ask the addon's dev to handle your case? He might agree to add it to its addon, if he can consider it is a use case of his addon he would be able to make efforts to support, and you get to have an in-house solution catered to your need that will also profit other people, without changing your own tools.
You could also consider using another set of tools that gives you the result you want in the first place. E.g, you could use the voxel remesher that automatically makes your mesh manifold (but might bevel some angles a little bit depending on the settings), or start again from your icosphere and use a remesh modifier in block mode to make it blocky, or use booleans, or find another set of geonodes that do what you need, or make your own geonodes, ...
yes, thats a very fair point. And I don't disagree with you. I just thought that it would be beneficial to have a feature to find all "outer" faces like it could do it how minecraft does it with their block generation where they look at the block faces and see witch ones are scene by the player and dont laod in the other faces of the block that are not needed thats how it keeps up performance.
thanks, but I tried all of these and the issue still persisted
That would be something to post on Blender Stack Exchange or Blender Artists Community ;)
Sure! And thanks for trying anyway :)