How to delete everything out of FOV?

Hi there! The title pretty much says it all. I have an animated camera moving in a scene. I want to delete everything out of FOV to save ram and time doing the render. Is there a quick way to do this? At the moment I select the objects manually, and even though it doesn’t take to much time it does when you have to do it very often or if you have an insanely large amount of objects.
Thank you very much.

Preferably I’d like an automatic or semi-automatic method. :yes:

But if the camera moves, wouldn’t objects constantly move in in and out of the camera’s FOV? And if you delete the objects outside the FOV, don’t you also lose everything those objects contribute to the scene in terms of indirect light and reflections on the objects inside the FOV?

BTW, what render engine are we talking about? AFAIK Blender Internal only renders what is in the frame to begin with. For Cycles you could e. g. try using a Layer Weight > Is Camera Ray node to switch all objects unseen by the camera to a lighter and faster rendering shader…

Thank you for your answer.

“if the camera moves, wouldn’t objects constantly move in in and out?”

Yes, and those objects shouldn’t be deleted.

“And if you delete the objects outside the FOV, don’t you also lose everything those objects contribute to the scene in terms of indirect light and reflections on the objects inside the FOV?”

You are also correct. But objects that are too far out won’t cause a noticeable difference. And that is where an adjustable threshold of distance from out of FOV would also be desirable. But that’s pushing things a bit too far for the moment.

If I can figure out a way of selecting all the objects inside or out of FOV of the camera in it’s entire animated path would be great. I have a single complex scene (lots of objects) with various camera movements. Deleting what’s unnecessary for each camera render will save ram and cpu/gpu time, but it’s not much use if the time saved is spent deleting objects manually.

Of course, if one has a complex scene with complex lighting then one might consider not to delete any objects at all. But in many cases, objects in large scenes can be deleted without any problems, well, depending on the materials and other stuff they’re made of.

A modifier or script would be nice that could select everything 5º, 10º or 20º out of FOV. Or maybe it’s already hidden in blender?

Ah! And I’m using cycles, I started using blender after cycles started. I have not bothered with blender internal really.

Anybody? No ideas?

If it’s not possible, where or who could I suggest developing something for doing so?

Hi

Dunno if this can help You.

From https://developer.blender.org/D1230

SUMMARY
The idea is to give artists a simplier way to control memory usage in such
scenes as grass fields by doing automatic object culling based on whether
they’re visible in the frame or not.
This is controlled on per-object level. In order to use this option few
steps are required:

  • Enable scene simplification (in the scene buttons).
  • In the scene simplification settings enable camera cull.
  • Enable Camera cull for objects which are desired to be culled (object culling option could be found in Option panel in object buttons).

Interface decisions are not final for sure and to be refined if this
option is considered good enough for production.

And a link: http://archive.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-234/game-blender/index.html

Just a thought I’m a noob…:slight_smile:

Tai

but is this included in latest built ?

happy bl

Thanks, but I can’t find that. But it does seem to do what I need, which is to save ram.

I’ll carry on doing manual labour for the moment.

Is this still not possible?

Camera and distance culling are available for Cycles, but not Eevee (likely because it requires a potentially costly preprocessing step, while Eevee is supposed to be “instant” render). This is a very niche requirement anyway, and something that probably could be scripted on user’s end without burdening the developers with developing and maintaining something only a handful of users would ever use.

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Thank you. But I’m talking about literally getting everything deleted that is out of FOV.
And I’m using Vray engine for this particular project anyway.