SceneDoctor — find out what is actually wrong with your scene

Files get messy. Materials multiply into Material.007, textures go missing after a folder move, a test subdivision stays at level 5, and the file that opened in two seconds now takes forty. SceneDoctor scans the whole scene, tells you exactly what it found, and fixes the parts that can be fixed safely.

What it looks for

Twenty checks, sorted by how much trouble they are actually causing:

• Missing textures — image files the scene refers to that are not on disk. The most common reason a render comes out wrong.
• Duplicate materials — the Material.001 explosion, detected by comparing what materials are rather than what they are called.
• Unused data — meshes, materials, images and actions nothing references any more, still being saved into your file.
• Heavy meshes — objects over your triangle budget, heaviest first.
• Oversized textures — images bigger than your limit, because texture memory is usually the first thing to run out.
• Subdivision set backwards — viewport level higher than render level, which makes your viewport slower than your final frame.
• Loose geometry — vertices belonging to no face, which break exporters and bakes long after anyone remembers making them.
• Unapplied scale — the cause of half the mysterious problems in physics, bakes, modifiers and export.
• Hidden but rendering — objects hidden in the viewport that will still appear in the render.
• Missing UV maps — meshes with faces and nothing to bake, paint or export onto.
• Negative scale — and on which axis. Blender copes with a mirrored object; the package you export it to often does not.
• Modifier visibility — modifiers on for the viewport but not the render, or the other way round. Usually the answer to why a render does not match the viewport.
• Far from the origin — objects far enough out that float precision starts showing as jitter and z-fighting.
• Unused material slots and empty vertex groups — the leftovers of a hundred edits, both with a fix button.
• Modifiers doing nothing — a boolean with no object, an array of one, subdivision at level 0. Set up halfway and quietly having no effect.
• Packed images — with their sizes, largest first. The usual answer to why a file is four hundred megabytes.
• N-gons, default names, empty collections — the tidy-up notes, kept at the bottom where they belong.

Every check has its own switch, so a studio can silence the ones it does not care about. A scan that ran with checks switched off says so in the report rather than calling the scene clean.

Fixes you can trust

Five checks come with a one-click fix, and each one tells you exactly what it will do before you press it:

• Merge Duplicates repoints every object at one material per group. Only materials that would render identically are merged — two different materials that happen to be called Metal and Metal.001 are left alone.
• Purge Unused deletes orphaned data, repeatedly, since removing a material can orphan the image it used. Anything marked with a fake user is kept.
• Apply Scale applies it where it is safe. Linked duplicates share their mesh, so applying to one would silently resize the others — those are skipped and stay in the report for you to handle.
• Remove Slots removes only the material slots no face points at, and renumbers the faces so each one keeps the material it was already showing. A mesh shared with another object, or a slot linked to the object rather than the mesh, is skipped — and the report says which and why.
• Remove Groups removes vertex groups that are empty and that nothing names. A group any modifier, constraint or node tree refers to by name is kept even when it holds no weights, because it is still doing a job.

The other fifteen checks are advisory on purpose. Flagging something for a human to look at is worth more than a button that quietly changes a scene in a way nobody intended.

Read-only until you say otherwise

Scanning never changes anything — verified by comparing the scene before and after. Fixes are separate buttons, ask for confirmation, and are fully undoable.

A report you can send

Copy the whole thing to the clipboard, or write it into a text block saved with the file. Click any finding to select and zoom to the object it refers to.

Tested, not assumed

189 automated checks run in a clean Blender against every release. Every diagnostic is run twice: once against a scene with that exact problem planted in it, and once against a deliberately tidy scene. It has to find the first and stay silent on the second — a diagnostic that cries wolf is worse than none, because people stop reading it. The fixes are verified by measuring the scene afterwards: that every face still shows the material it had before a slot was removed, that a weighted group kept its weights, and that a shared mesh really is left untouched and still listed.

Requirements

Blender 4.2 LTS or newer. Windows, macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) and Linux. No dependencies, works offline.