I was given an excessively bloated CAD file with screws, circuits, motors, etc that aren’t needed for the animation I’m working on which is just the outside of a product with some simple camera moves. The trouble is all the parts are on the same layer, ungrouped, and with the same material. The outer shell of the product is also broken up into hundreds of faces.

My solution has been selecting each face by hand, one at a time, which takes forever. We get shots like this every month at my company and we need a better way.

I considered writing a script that ctrl+shift clicks every pixel within the viewer, because this will select everything the camera can see, and will not select the internal parts. I would be able to move the camera to a few different positions, run the script, delete the excess, and be done in 5 minutes.

Can anyone point me in the right direction in either writing the script, or let me know if such a tool already exists?