How to optimize voxel artwork? (combine meshes, merge planar faces)

[mikeZ7BJ8]

I am using the RayFire Voxels plugin to convert some meshes to voxels. It (predictably) generates a bunch of cubes as shown in the attached screenshot. 

Is there a way to merge all these cubes into a single mesh? And also merge planar faces of the same colour into a single face? I like the result well enough but the polycount is too high for my purposes.

Thanks!

-Mike

[RobH2]

Try doing a 'Snapshot' of the thing. Go to 'Tools' menu and hit 'Snapshot.' Make the 'Clone Method' as 'Mesh' and see if it works for you. 

[mikeZ7BJ8]

Thanks for the suggestion. I just tried that and it made a copy of the mesh, but it didn't (appear to) make any other changes to it.

[RobH2]

I think merging the planar faces into one might be a manual thing. There's no magic button for that really unless the voxel plugin offers it. You might try taking the Snapshot and doing a Retopology on it. Before the Retopo, maybe do a weld to try to merge those planar edges together. 

You have an intersting challenge. You are going to have to get creative I think. Upload it and I'll tinker with it. 

[mikeZ7BJ8]

Oh wow, thanks! I've attached a max file with a sample voxel shape.

[RobH2]

Ok, I'll poke around and see what I can figure out. 

[RobH2]

The issue with the Voxel producing scripts is that they do exactly what they are told, they take a volume and make voxels. Meaning, the cubes that represent voxels are stacked to form the surface shape but the are also stacked internally, completely filling the inner volume. It creates a solid stack of blocks, not just a skin that is just a skin of planes. So, you have to remove the interior planes to leave a skin and then weld the coincident verts of that skin. 

Unfortunately, this means you have to just find a fast way to manually do the reduction. I 'drag-selected' the surface planes and then hid that plane. Then I'd 'drag-select' another set of planes making another surface and hid those. About 45-minutes later, I had hidden all of the surface planes leaving a ton of internal planes. I selected what remained and deleted them and then unhid the planes I'd hidden. Those unhidden planes were now just a  skin suface. I selected all the verts and welded them. 

I attached a file. you can see your original and the new one, both with a slice modifier so you can see inside to what I'm talking about. I also found a post by one of our best and highly missed contributors to the forum, Steve Curley. If he didn't know how to do something, then no one did. Here's his post as well. 

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/3ds-max-modeling/remove-redundant-internal-faces/td-p/3996846

[dmitriy.shpilevoy]

Maybe it's possible to find "outmost" faces with maxscript. Or the other way around - only faces/vertices/edges that are completely covered. Try asking in programming section.

"Poor man's" solution would be to use a series of Vol.Select modifiers or maybe just one could be enough if you can make a lowpoly mesh representation of overall voxel shape.

[mikeZ7BJ8]

Vol.Select is an interesting solution; I didn't know about that modifier before. That does do a lot of the work for me but the result is still too much of a manual process for this purpose. Thanks for the suggestion!

I'll try posting in programming.