Need help with selecting occluded faces

[thundermare]

Hi guys,

This is my first post on these forums but i visit this site for a long time.
I'm developing a video game and i ran in some problems recently regarding the poly count in my levels.

Many of my ingame assets are big rock and stones and they are many in number. Because these meshes are packed together tightly, many of the faces of one object are entierly inside another object and they will never be visible ingame. So i want to find a way how to delete all these faces whitout too much trouble, if possible.

In the picture below there are two spheres that are sharing faces inside eachother.

My current approach for deleting these faces is the following:

Using the camera based selection i just drag selection and then from each angle i can think of i keep adding faces to the selection, ultimatly selecting all the faces that are not inside the spheres. Then i turn off the camera based selection and invert the seletcion. Now I have selected just the faces inside the spheres and delete them.

 
The problem with this is that it takes a lot of time and sometimes i miss faces and i make unwanted deleting, making holes in my meshes. 

So i am asking if there is some kind of Mel script or other solution for easy selecting these occluded faces?

Cheers,
Alex 

[joojaa]

bake a simple occluison to per vertex and kill all vertices that have a color of 0? Perhaps faces with all 0 vertices. Simple loop really.

Or

set camera based selection keep rotating camera with drawing boxes ctrl shift down inverse selection and delete. This can also be done in older mayas with software rendering (and a expression node) to select faces with preset views so it can be automated pretty easily.

[thundermare]

Okay, I baked the AO and I got all the verticies i dont like, but i dont know how to select all verticies with color 0. Can you help me with that since i don't know MEL scripting. Better yet as you said best solution for me is as you said to delete all faces with their verticies all 0.

I am using Maya 2011.

Thanks. 

[vinchess]

Before you merge the 2 spheres, you could use the boolean function, that would remove everything inside it, if thats wat ure looking to achieve