Hi,
I’ve been trying to use Dataprep recently to manage importing and merging the meshes of similarly named StaticMeshActors, but can’t figure out how to do this. I can manually tell Dataprep to find all objects named “abcxyz” and merge them together, but I have to tell it do this for every set of objects that are being imported.
For example there could be 100 “A-DM-Door” to merge, 100 “A-DM-Railing”, 100 “A-DM-Glazing” etc etc etc… very big files with lots of components.
What I need is a way to point to an incoming data set, and merge every object that shares at least 10 characters together.
I could merge by Revit material when linking to 3DSMax, but some of our files are so massive that this causes problems - the resulting geometry covers such a massive area that the lightmaps, even at max resolution, are far too small. So I’m resorting to not merging by Revit material, and exporting each project in several chunks via Datasmith. for example, Floor_00, Floor_01 etc…
If anyone has any ideas I’d be very grateful.
Thanks
I’ve been thinking about this too. I was thinking a compromise might be to write a custom node that merges a certain number of objects before staring a new object.
For example merging batches of 50 mullions at a time, so you have fewer objects and lighmaps can make ore sense, plus the smaller objects allow for culling out parts that dont show and all the other optimization tricks that game engines use.
We don’t want every million as a separate object, but also don’t want one big dumb blob either. Maybe merge, but separated by hierarchy, material and/or additional options. Maybe also a multi-name filter. ie: walls, floors, windows, columns, all in 1 node, then it can pass the multiple separated lists to the next operation to merge, create LODs etc.
Explanations and examples are still hard to come by (epic provides a couple super simple ones but not enough to really get people going imo) This guy has a pretty good walkthrough on how to set up custom filters and operations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcY-…Zgb347oaVrEbOG
I have not had the chance to use dataprep on revit exports yet, but the sketchup process has not been smooth. I took the time to explode all the sub components in, say, the chairs, only to find that datasmith still separated the model into the “loose parts” and grouped them under an empty actor, leading to thousands and thousands of small meshes. I can merge them by name, but then I end up with one big dumb mesh. what I really want is to merge the objects under the first actor, set up LODs, copy that nice merged, optimized object around to the other actors, deleting all the tiny parts along the way.