Selecting Objects only visible to what the camera can see

[clydesmets]

Hello fellow cgarchitects,

 

I'm trying to figure out a solution that will save time on a project that I am working on. I've been scouting through the internet and am having no luck in finding something that can do what I am hoping for.

 

Here's the problem. I have a large model from Revit imported into 3ds Max (40mil verts). Unfortunately Revit likes to add an additional shit load of verts all over the place on particular objects making the scene difficult to work with when importing it into 3ds max. Since the client only needs to see a particular side of the building for the animation I can cull off the other side of the building where it's not seen by the camera. Is there a way to select objects not seen by the camera and added them into a invisible layer?

[Nicolai Bongard]

You could try camera clipping, as in only rendering what is between the near and far clipping range. But then you have to add the background in post i suppose, and you would perhaps have to animate the clipping range as well, wich could be kind of annoying. You could also try to select your camera, set the show view cone to always, and then select everything that is not within the view cone and change the properties of those objects to not visible to camera. Perhaps you could also try with setting up planes with some sort of matte surface to block out the parts of the scene that you do not wish to see. Those planes can be linked to your camera so they follow the camera movement. If you open your layer editor you can easily create a layer that is hidden, and then add your objects to that layer as well, but i am not aware of any automated function wich does that for you.