Find submesh and replace with instances

Question

I have a lot of meshes of different houses, each house is a single mesh, but parts of this single mesh has some repeating features, such as windows, doors, etc.

I am looking for a way to reduce the poly-count of the mesh, since this will be used in a (Unity) game.

Is there any simple way to select a single piece of the mesh (E.g. a window), separate this into another mesh, and let blender find similar shapes (may be rotated) in the original mesh and replace those with a linked duplicates?

Answer 1

you can write a script to separate every object into loose parts. Then for every object do a unit_test_compare with the data of the other object if the result it's "Same" then make it a linked duplicate, but before copy the world matrix to not loose the position scaling and rotation and apply it to the newly linked duplicate ie.

print(firstObj.data.unit_test_compare(secondObj.data))

will yield to the string "Same" if they are the same and "Number of verts don't match" for different objects

Let me know if this is not enough

edit : possible duplicate answer

Answer 2

While this will certainly not deal with different rotations or orientations automatically the closest thing I can think of without resorting to coding would be the following, assuming each window, door, or other feature is a separate entity from the rest of the house mesh (with no shared vertex or faces)

1. Enter edit mode on your mesh
2. Select a single face or edge from one of soon-to-be independent objects, like say one of your windows, that as a very distinct feature, like a particularly unique face area, a unique number of concurrent edges, a particular length, or a specific number of surrounding faces, specific to that type of window
3. This will allow you to use Shift + G to select similar and choose the particular feature that is unique among all windows
4. Adjust the threshold to a value low enough that will only select edges exclusively from sub-objects of the same type (windows in this example)
5. Now press Ctrl + L to select all linked so that Blender selects the whole windows
6. Now you have all windows selected and you can separate them from the main mesh using P > Selection
7. Exit edit mode and enter edit mode on your newly created all-windows mesh. If all windows are comprised of a single linked set of faces you can now use P again to separate all windows into their own object with the option By loose parts
8. Every window should now be an independent object, although still not sharing objectdata, so now exit edit mode, with all windows selected and press Shift + Ctrl + Alt + C and choose Origin to geometry
9. Still with all windows selected (make sure one of them is the active object) now press Ctrl + L Make Links > Object Data
10. Your windows should now be all correctly placed and sharing object data, although rotations will still be messed up

If these are regular orthogonal buildings manually rotating them back into place should not be too laborious, as they will likely fall into either 90 -90 or 180 rotations but will still require some manual labor. If someone smarter than me can come up with a way to solve this last part without manual work I would love to hear it.

For whole buildings, if they are all equal or share a few different designs that repeat you could separately build a few groups comprised of several repeating parts (windows, doors, etc) and use group instances to replace whole buildings making a more modular approach, though I can think of no technique to correctly place them in the scene.