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HUGE filesize please help


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Hi guys,

We are creating an animation as part of a team at our agency and I'm taking the elements and placing them in a final scene. There are 5 scenarios in a room some using dynamics. mograph and abit of keyframe animation...Although I've ended up baking most of the dynamic sims to keyframes to allow me to scrub the timeline. 

The project has been fine up to now but now I'm struggling to work as the files are getting ridiculously large in filesize, and it's not even a complex animation..One of them is around 18gb and takes about 20 minutes to save, so I've lost work a few times due to avoiding to save. 

I've gone through everyone's stuff and everything is fairly optimised, nothing screams out that it would cause large filesize and to be honest this animation is super simple mostly using primitive shapes. I've deleted everyone's models apart from the one the camera is currently on and we've actually had to render like this with no background elements due to the filesize.  (See screenshot) So that scene in the screenshot is 9gb! Quarter of a million polygons for a 2 minute animation shouldn't be creating filesizes this big surely?

Thought they'd fixed this with R18 but apparently not. I just wondered if I'm doing something wrong or if there's a way of avoiding being in this situation.

Any help would be appreciated!

CapturePoly.PNG

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This is indeed strange. What about textures? HDRI maps? Are those included there? Simple animation shouldn't be so large in size! 

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The polygons, points, etc aren't crazy. Have you got any mograph cache tags, baked objects, anything with a "cache" type option?

9gb is bonkers for a file unless you've got say a cloner with 1000 objects all baked for 2 minutes or something like that.

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Guest roybotics

Ya I check your caches.  I have had huge files sizes because of complex dynamic caching.  In mograph and with the C4D dynamics engine. 

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Materials are minimal, infact I use mostly the same material across the room as it's quite a minimal room. Mograph caches are pretty non-existent as i've baked most of the stuff to keyframes...Even so 8gb is the size when I remove alot of the scenes so I'm not sure whats going on.

What would generally be larger in file size the dynamic cache or baking to keyframes?

Like I said I had this problem with r17 files previously, but thought they'd fixed a bug because when I opened a 10gb project file in r18 and saved it ended up saving out at around 20mb...No word a lie.

I can't see how any agency would be able to work like this so there must be something abit abnormal going on.

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Copy and paste whole scene to new scene and then save didn´t help?

Check in Preferences/Files option "Save Polygons for Melange" if it is off. (enabled option create huge files)

If didn´t help, try to send your R17 scene file to support with small info for developers...

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Export your animated elements to an alembic and then import them into the C4D file. Baked stuff is always huge but if you export it to an alembic it will be faster to work with in C4D. Plus if your scene autosaves etc it won't resave the whole alembic, just the C4D pointing to it.

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2 hours ago, grain said:

Export your animated elements to an alembic and then import them into the C4D file. Baked stuff is always huge but if you export it to an alembic it will be faster to work with in C4D. Plus if your scene autosaves etc it won't resave the whole alembic, just the C4D pointing to it.

I have been playing around with alembic actually and learnt alot from this project that I will be stressing to the team in future...Can I just ask what are the difference between Alembic and xrefs? I feel like they are similar but what are the pros and cons of using one over the other? I wouldn't mind being able to offset the start of an animation within an alembic file, and currently can't see a way of doing that with either of the formats.

 

5 hours ago, bezo said:

Copy and paste whole scene to new scene and then save didn´t help?

Check in Preferences/Files option "Save Polygons for Melange" if it is off. (enabled option create huge files)

If didn´t help, try to send your R17 scene file to support with small info for developers...

I've just read up on this again, I believe I enabled this a while back after reading about AE integration with Cinema, thought nothing of it at the time but after reading it makes complete sense! It seems it embeds a polygonal version of the scene which could explain it.  I will check this first thing in the morning when I get to work.

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Alembic is a cross-app standard file format for exporting animated elements. It's a more modern, robust FBX type format that allows you to export particles, splines, etc as well as normal polygon animation.

Xrefs are for C4D only and can be really useful, but they require a lot of discipline across the team to use them properly. Also they used to be a lot more basic (but easy to use) and then around v15 or 16 they updated the xRef tech and now it's a lot more granular.. and I never use it now as a result. You can quite easily accidentally import the original animation into your file which negates the whole point of them.

Alembics are fast and clean so they're better to work with IMO, except I think materials don't work with them.

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  • 1 year later...

I've just encountered the very same issues, but without even having any dynamics at all.  I've built a set in R18, and each time I've saved (with a bit more within it in each version) the file gets bigger and bigger. And not just a little bit bigger, CRAZY bigger.  The current version is 23GB, and took about 6 minutes to save.

 

I then opening up the same file in R19, which took about 4 minutes to open, saved it as an R19 file, and checked the file size. Now the file is only 2.8MB!

 

So, not sure what's going on with R18. The only reason I'm still using it is because I've got loads of go-to plugins in my R18, that I haven't migrated over to R19 yet.

 

Anyway, point is  - this issue is still present in R18 clearly.... but has maybe been resolved in R19

I had found a few weeks back that having a Cloner 'active' vs 'deactivating' it before saving (this is in R18) made a huge difference in how long it took to save the file.  That doesn't seem to be an issue in R19 (fingers crossed)

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  • 2 years later...
On 7/26/2018 at 6:50 AM, JHowells said:

 

 

Anyway, point is  - this issue is still present in R18 clearly.... but has maybe been resolved in R19

 

Nope, still happening on R20. I have melange deactivated and nothing fancy happening on my scene, no dynamis or anything to cache and the file is already at 1.65 gb. It is a fairly simple file.

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I may have missed it but from what I read it seems like the OP hasn't tried even the most basic troubleshooting steps such as deleting half the scene, then half more, then half more after that until you find what deletion if any solves the problem.  

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