Scene File Size BALLOONS
mikethe3dguy
Posts: 515
What are some changes that can cause a scene to suddenly balloon in size?
I have a series of files that all contain the same exact figures, props, environments, HDRI and textures, with a few small changes. Here and there I've added or deleted a light or two, modified texture files, and probably added 3 or 4 primitive planes, and the figure and prop poses have changed. This is a series of files, each used for a different panel in a comic book, Taking the last file in the series, then making pose, lighting and camera angle changes for the next panel. Occasionally I might use Mesh Grabber on a clothing article in a scene. The most common size for each scene file is around 85MB, but in the series I see that it all of a sudden balloons to almost 1GB from say, scene 9 to scene 10. When I check each file I can't see any significant difference.
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I just saw a similar post about huge scene sizes before mine and wanted to add that these scenes do have a single dForce clothing item that I clear and re-simulate in each file, using a custom Timeline frame range. But this is the same in each file.
Mesh Grabber will also, I think, add a lot of data - especially if you use a weight map with it or spawn a morph.
I haven't - just used it for on-the-fly geometry adjustments.
In ptinciple, if you are not changing the items/products/assets that you load into the scene, the file size of the scene stays small, but any and all changes you make have to be memorized somewhere, otherwise the scene would not be the same when you open it the next time. Don't be fooled by small file sizes of scenes as they can be found on the disk, those do not tell anything about the actual size of the scene.
The largest scene I have had was way over 3GB;s in size.
I understand that scene files contain only path references for textures so the actual scene may be huge while the scene file size is small. But as a typical example: if a few minor figure/object posing and position changes, a swap of a bump or diffuse map or two and a single instance of using Mesh Grabber on a shirt results in the file size increasing by over TEN-fold... there is something wrong, and I'd like to find out what.
If you have the hardware to handle heavy load, open the file in Notepad++ and see what's changed and what information is saved in one that wasn't saved in the other.
Maybe even do some experimenting with a scene that holds just the minimum of assets.
Interesting thought, but can a Daz scene file be opened as a text file? I tried it and it's encrypted garbage. Tried renaming the .duf to a .zip and can't open it so I don't know if it's a different type of file compression or what.
At least 7-Zip can open them as archives, even without changing the .duf to anything.
I have set Notepad++ as the editor inside 7-Zip, so I can open the files straight from there and what you get is typical code that you can easily understand if you have done any programing at some point or another.
IIRC it's gzip compression. You can uncompress the compressed duf files with 7zip. No need to change extension beforehand. IIRC there's also a script for that included in DS.
It's not really surprising that using geometry editing tools like mesh grabber would make the scene file much bigger, as all the changes made to the geometry have to be saved in the scene file.
Oh my god you were absolutely right! I wouldn't have believed it, but I took one file that was 915MB and had only made a few small adjustments at the cuffs of a pair of jeans using Mesh Grabber. I reset the MG changes to zero. Before: 915MB. After: 84MB!!! WOW.
Do bear in mind that this really matters only for disc space. When you load a scene fiel DS reads a lot of asset files that are stored in the Data folder and linked from within the scene file - they will account for more data than the scene file, unless you have a lot of actual embedded figures or props. When you render textures are loaded (usually they are kept only at lower resolution for working in the Viewport) and all those morphs, modifieers (dForms, joints, mesh grabber) are baked down to a single set of vertex postions. Size on disc, size in memory for posing, and size in memory for rendering are only loosely related.
Aside from disc space it's slowed the operation of saving a scene way down. Instead of 10 seconds, these ballooned files take 2 to even 3-4 minutes to complete a save.
I could be wrong, and happy to be corrected, but this is my understanding. Every figure you load into a scene needs data to list the coordiantes of each vertex that make up that figure. I believe that data is stored in the data folder in your content library. when you save the scene, you are saving an index of what files within the data folder need to be accessed to load the vertex coordinates. Even a saved morph gets written to the data folder. If you use modifiers like meshgrabber, push modifiers, dforce, etc and then save the scene, the mesh of the figure has changed but has not yet been saved anywhere for the changes to be indexed, so that information must be saved within the scene file causing it to bloat.