So I'm going through the castle re-texturing stuff and I notice that theres a good bit of geometry that doesn't see the light of day.. literally. Like each tower roof seems to have two roofs.. one shingled and one not. The smooth ones are the outside version (less geometry) and the shingles have a good bit of geometry but can't be seen.

Is it safe to get rid of something thats hidden? Also can I save out a seperate action for building the castle that hides some of the stuff that doesn't need to render from the inside?

I'm assuming just because something is obscured it still adds allot to the render time with reflection calculation, shadows, etc.

By the way I'm rustifying the whole lot.. and loosing lots of reflections. Still working on a way I like as far as tarnish and grungifying the nooks and crannies. No more boring mirror like surface ;-) I'll post pics when I get it the way I want it.

If you can, populate the Castle set with Action Objects. That way, if a shot needs outside stuff, drop on the "outside stuff" Action; inside stuff - drop on the "inside stuff" Action; or lose a couple Actions that only have unseen stuff.

I don't know what's with the 2 roofs. Keep the best one, lose the other one, (maybe somebody was building from the proxy and forgot to get rid of old geometry?)

The double roof, that's me. I forgot to remove the shingles. What happened is that I unified the forms of the roofs to make them all curved cones. Only some of the roof had curved cone shingles though. And I didn't bother modeling the missing ones. IMO, it is not worth modeling that since this is never seen close-up. A texture would work just as well. It would probably not render significatively faster but it would use less memory. So yes, you may remove the shingles.

Waaay back, when I made a proxy....which I don't think was used eventually......I had intended to make the shingles into normal maps. I was going to use some existing shingles in a "block" and use Aaver's Normal map generator plugin to make a tile map.

Yeah thats what I intend to do as well.

Thanks for the answers, I'll keep at it. Is there some diagram of the castle as its constructed. Its a bear to work with as a whole and I'm not familiar enough with the parts to texture them seperately without some issues popping up. I guess I'll just have to wrap my head around it and "bear" through it all ;-)

I'm thinking I'll seperate the terrain from the castle proper though.. that should free up some resources and hopefully speed things up.