Decimate only "bad" objects in a scene

Question

I'm working for a company and they have to optimize 3d scenes to be rendered in virtual reality. The problem is that the people who are modeling the scenes are really bad at doing that. I've seen scenes where small objects had a really large amount of vertices (imagine a scene where a building has, let's say, 100 k vertices, and only one lamp has 15 k vertices...)

I want to write a script that decimates the geometry only for those objects that have an insane number of vertices but, how do I detect them?

I was thinking about computing the volume for each mesh and compare it with the number of vertices, but this would be really expensive and I'm not sure It's a good way to detect such meshes.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

This script:

import bpy, bmesh

THR = 4  # <-- the only parameter. The smaller, the stricter

for element in bpy.data.objects:
    if element.type != "MESH": continue

    # reset
    for m in element.modifiers:
        if m.name == 'ScriptedDecimate':
            element.modifiers.remove(m)

    # scoring function
    vert = len(element.data.vertices)
    areabbox = (element.dimensions.x*element.dimensions.y
               + element.dimensions.y*element.dimensions.z
               + element.dimensions.x*element.dimensions.z)*2
    indicator = vert/areabbox

    # select and decimate!
    if (indicator > THR):
        element.select=True
        decimator = element.modifiers.new("ScriptedDecimate", type = "DECIMATE")
        decimator.ratio = (THR/indicator)**(2/3)
        bpy.context.scene.update()
    else:
        element.select=False

can be useful.

It creates a Decimate modifier for each element where the number of vertices, divided by the surface area of the bounding box, is greater than a set threshold THR. It also adds these object to your selection (and removes all the unaffected meshes). It resets its actions every time you run it again (to avoid double modifiers).

The Decimate Ratio depends on "how far" the original vertex count per area was from the threshold (but it doesn't try to decimate it right to the point where it doesn't exceed the threshold!).

↑↑   verts, faces (tris): 6171, 7182 (12218) → 1743, 2601 (3374)