How to delete bones?

XoechZ

Hello!

I have a room prop that is split up into several parts (floor, 4 walls, ceiling). Unfortunately these parts are bones. For my render I only need two walls and the floor. So I want to get rid of the other two walls and the ceiling. I cannot delete these bones in the Scene tab, because when I delete a bone, I delete the whole prop. Of course I can make them invisible, but then the geometry and the textures are still loaded - just not visible in the render. As I am rendering with Iray it is always good to get rid of unused stuff, to save VRAM.

So, how can I get rid of these unused bones? How can I delete them?

mjc1016

Removing geometry doesn't really matter or save you all that much memory.  A 4K  resolution image file is going to eat up close to 50 MB of memory...that's the equivalent of roughly 500,000 polys.

Remove the textures associated with the out of scene items (apply a 'clay'/'default' grey shader preset) and call it a day, you'll save way more memory and time.

XoechZ

Ok, that sounds good. I will do so.

But, just out of curiosity, is it so hard or complicated to delete bones from a figure?

Design Anvil - Razor42

Edit: As mjc correctly pointed out below deleting the bone will not remove the geometry. You would need to use the geometry editor to select the surfaces relating to the bone, hide and then delete hidden geometry.

 

To delete a bone.

Tools -> Joint editor

Select the redundant bone.

Right click delete Bone.

I expect you would need to resave the prop at that point to maintain changes after saving and reopening the scene file.

Becareful not to save over the original file with your modified prop or you will need to reinstall the original. 

mjc1016

XoechZ said:

Ok, that sounds good. I will do so.

But, just out of curiosity, is it so hard or complicated to delete bones from a figure?

Deleting a bone, in this case won't do much...it won't delete the wall, for example.  To remove the wall, use the Geometry editor and select it by the face group (it's likely the same name as the bone), then set it hidden.  Then you can delete the hidden faces.

Servant

mjc1016 said:

Removing geometry doesn't really matter or save you all that much memory.  A 4K  resolution image file is going to eat up close to 50 MB of memory...that's the equivalent of roughly 500,000 polys.

Remove the textures associated with the out of scene items (apply a 'clay'/'default' grey shader preset) and call it a day, you'll save way more memory and time.

I agree with this. Many times, I wonder how a product I just bought could be so RAM intensive, then realize later it's the textures. If the part is hidden (i.e. not going to be in the scene), clearing/replacing the textures is a good alternative.

peteanderson1212

I have a different scenario here. I did not want to delete the props/figures/walls in the room (the cabinet and fireplace are baked as bones) for which I wanted to change the placement. Hence I created control bones for them which allowed me basic transformations as if it were an actual prop. My problem is how could I bake that new placement into the original bone? 

I could just leave it as such maybe, but is there a way to bake it in and then delete the control bone?