Saving Characters as Scene Subsets: Some file sizes are humongous. Problem solved!

Blind Owl

I'm creating a cast of characters for a story project I've been contemplating, and saving them as scene subsets: hair, materials, etc. I can't believe the variation I'm seeing in .duf file sizes—anywhere from 1.5 mb to over 600—and I don't know what's causing the bloat or how to reduce it.

Most are G3 figures with assorted face and body morphs from various packages, which I'm sure is bound to cause some bloat. Some have pretty heavyweight hairs—lots of curls, lots of shaping options—which is bound to add more.

One or two have fibre eyebrows and p*bic hair (take that, crappy forum search engine! ) and my render times tell me they're a heavy load.

Still, does 600 mb seem reasonable for an unclothed character? I plan to add clothes to at least a few of them, and I shudder to think what that will do to the file size.

If there's a way to reduce this, or something I've been doing wrong, I'd sure appreciate knowing about it. I've been avoiding file compression, more or less on principle, but I may have to resort to it.

Richard Haseltine

If the item already has asset files then the .duf file will simply store references to those, but if it has freshly imported content (OBJ or Poser files, or custom morphs) or converted content (AutoFitted from a diffrent figure for example) then those will be embedded in the file, greatly increasing its size.

Blind Owl

Thanks, Richard. No .obj, Poser, or auto-fitted content so far, only DS and Rendo-for-DS (e.g. the fibre eyebrows) but lots & lots of morphs, plus shaders for the follicles on various parts of the character, including the top of her head.

I tried compression and my 600+ megabyte subset came out to 180 mb, which is the same as saving the character as a scene. I can only assume that scenes are automatically compressed, since there's no box to check or uncheck. I must admit I couldn't tell the difference in a side-by-side comparison iRay render, so either my eyes are bad or compression is the way to go.

Richard Haseltine

Compression is just a lossless compression method - not Zip I think, but similar. Generally the files conmpress well, being text in essence, but I have occasionally seen people find that in writing a compressed file a byte gets dropped or changed and that breaks the file (with uncompressed text it would produce a bad character, which might be recovereable). You can compress and uncompress files with a tool like 7Zip or with the Batch Convert pane inside DS.

Blind Owl

Richard Haseltine said:

Compression is just a lossless compression method - not Zip I think, but similar. Generally the files conmpress well, being text in essence, but I have occasionally seen people find that in writing a compressed file a byte gets dropped or changed and that breaks the file (with uncompressed text it would produce a bad character, which might be recovereable). You can compress and uncompress files with a tool like 7Zip or with the Batch Convert pane inside DS.

In that case it would make sense to save both compressed and uncompressed versions, and archive the uncompressed file as a just-in-case backup. Good thing I happen to have an empty half-terabyte drive idling around inside my computer. It's hard work creating a character and I'd hate to lose it!

ggs_26de60e5b2

I know it's a late comment, but I have just read this one. I had a similar problem, I couldn't understand that after I added Santa, by Redz, my rendering had ground, almost to a halt.

On checking the size of Santa, I found, like yourself, that he was an incredibly large as a file. Then I realised he was an HD figure, and felt that explained it. I normally load a g3 figure and convert it with a slider from the list of my characters, but this time I used the Figure complete from the character selection from Redz, hence the huge file. So going back to my usual method I managed to get the Santa figure down to a sensible file size, and all was well.

Blind Owl

ggs_26de60e5b2 said:

I know it's a late comment, but I have just read this one. I had a similar problem, I couldn't understand that after I added Santa, by Redz, my rendering had ground, almost to a halt.

On checking the size of Santa, I found, like yourself, that he was an incredibly large as a file. Then I realised he was an HD figure, and felt that explained it. I normally load a g3 figure and convert it with a slider from the list of my characters, but this time I used the Figure complete from the character selection from Redz, hence the huge file. So going back to my usual method I managed to get the Santa figure down to a sensible file size, and all was well.

Thanks, I'll have to try that. My main character is something of a hodgepodge (though she looks fabulous IMHO ) and I'm not sure which elements from which figures went into her creation. I'll try taking her apart by saving her as a character morph, a materials preset, and whatever else I can think of, then applying those to a standard G3/V7 base character.

Blind Owl

I'm updating this because I found out what my problem was, and others may be experiencing the same.

After using ZevO's Fit Control on a clothing item, I thought it was enough to delete the unused morphs from the item in question. I didn't realize I needed to remove them from EVERY item parented to my character. In this case, that meant hair, fiber eyebrows, 3rd-party pubic hair, and 3rd-party genitals.

Once I clued in and removed those morphs, my character's file size shrank from over 180MB to a svelte 160K. Both were unclothed and both were saved as scene subsets, the only difference being the removal of all the unused morphs I didn't know were still hanging around.

I realize that the small file still needs to lug in all the stuff that's referenced, but at least that cut it down to a reasonable size. The character also seems to load faster, though I haven't done a speed comparison yet.