[dvsone1440]

I just made an MXS of a tree that came in not just as a bounding box... but all the individual components of the leaves all had individual bounding boxes? I saved it out individually and the red reference object was 11mb in skp?

[JDHill]

That would be because all the leaves were individual meshes, and were not enclosed within the bounding box of any larger mesh.

[dvsone1440]

Hi JD,
I am not sure I understand... the leaves were all one component (the same component) copied many times. What do you mean by "enclosed within the bounding box of a larger mesh"

[JDHill]

All faces directly contained in a given group or component are exported to MXS as one mesh. If a component A consists of many instances of another component, B, which in turn contains a face, you will have [number of A] * [number of B] meshes in your exported MXS (with Use Instances enabled, all but one of these meshes will instead appear as an instance of that mesh).

In creating the bounding box representation for a referenced MXS, the plugin scans through the file, building a list of bounding boxes, with one for each mesh or instance it contains. However, any bounding box which would be entirely enclosed within another is culled from the list, in the interest of reducing the amount of geometry generated, since such boxes would not add to the overall sense of the MXS.

[dvsone1440]

So I think if I understand this correctly... the only way to get a tree for instance, not have all of the leaves become individual bounding boxes, is to explode everything down to one mesh since I would never have geometry enclosing the leaves?

[JDHill]

That would be one way -- you don't have to collapse all the leaves into one mesh, you could explode and group subsets of them. It is not a bad idea to do this, even with MXS references completely out of the picture, with regards to performance in both SketchUp and Maxwell, because a group of, say, 100 faces will be lighter-weight, data-wise, than 100 instances of a component containing a single face, since each of those instances also carries its own name, material, transform, etc.