Jump to content
3DCoat Forums

3dCoat Eats My Harddrive For Breakfast


kay_Eva
 Share

Recommended Posts

  • Advanced Member

Hello, I'm not sure if I should put this in the bugs section or not. But was curious of others' experience with this. Um, but one of my biggest issues with 3dCoat is the harddrive issue. Right now I have a scene with 850k triangles in it and everytime I save file it costs me 60MB of harddrive space. Is it supposed to save as such a big file? Because right now, I can open the same model as obj in Sculptris and it only costs 9MB. Basically, I can't really use 3dCoat in order to finish models because once I begin adding details it begins eating up my 1TB harddrive so much. I mean, I like to save after every other adjustment I make. I usually save about 20-50 files per sculpt - then after I finish the model I will go back and delete 90% of those interim saves. In blender and sculptris it isn't an issue, but with 3dCoat it is completely impractical.

Should a 800k triangle scene cost 60MB to save? Is that normal? It's really kicking my butt. It's got me wincing whenever I go for Ctrl+Shift+S

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Advanced Member

This is what I'm talking about. Today, I literally cannot continue using 3dCoat on my model. I am being forced to switch to something else, because once this file size upgrades itself up to the 2gb mark, I won't even be able to open it anymore, nevermind the fact that it is cannibalizing my harddrive. This is on a 1million triangle scene.

http://i45.tinypic.com/2zexbtu.png

First of all a 1million triangle scene should probably not cost 300Mb, but then there is the fact that it DOUBLED on its own up to 700Mb. On its own! I'm being forced to switch to a different program to work on this model because I literally don't have the harddrive space to keep saving in 3dCoat. This only started happening after the changes where you could save color information to voxels and when you can drop the voxels to harddrive. But I didn't touch any of those settings in this scene. So I don't even know.

I may sound impatient, but that is because I have been experiencing this issue with 3dCoat for the past 6 months at least. At one point each of my saves costs over a gigabyte which forced me to delete a lot of my old saves which I really wish I hadn't had to do that. And now here I am again, looking a 700MB save in the face, eventually I'm going to have to delete these models. I don't want to have to do that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Contributor

I'll suggest something, I didn't try myself so maybe it doesn't work but maybe by doing a Cleanup memory, and then saving you could reduce the size of your scene file. This may only work with sculpts though.

Not sure if it work, but worth a try anyway. And I agree, 3b files are getting bigger and bigger,

I think there's some history caching in there, maybe it's helpful to andrew for debug purpose but it's bloating the file.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Advanced Member

I was quizzing this at the start of the year...http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=9267&hl=&fromsearch=1 ....there was sort of a solution there,probably the same as BeatKitano suggested.( caches etc ) I've not been using 3dCoat much this summer so I've completely forgot how it works, so I cant suggest anything else!........I wish someone would tell me how to get my 3d "mojo" back!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Reputable Contributor

If you have any layers cached, when you save, it adds to the file size. It plus side is that the scene is easier to load into memory, if layers are cached (the cache is only stored on your HD). So, if you have a laptop or older computer, and a scene is getting too heavy to load, you can cache some or all of the layers before saving. You can also save individual layers as a 3D Coat file, and dump it from the scene until you need it.

Nevertheless, the file sizes do seem to be excessive.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Advanced Member

i had a big file issue two times or more

but i my case it was only one file which got currupted at one point. This lead to astronomical increase of filesize, after each incremental save.

heres one http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=10085

didnt hear something about it, sadly

But this was only regarding those "already corrupted" files. It was not a general problem. But i think exporting in obj and reimporting in new scene didnt solve the size-problem for me. Even then the sizes went up to 1,3gb and higher.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Advanced Member

Yeah, I just tried to save again and my computer become unresponsive. I re-logged and it was still super sluggish so I had to restart. Basically, I can't edit my save files anymore it seems. It's really sad there is no answer to this issue. You have to do so many things in 3dCoat, switching space density, voxel resolution, switching voxel to surface mode and back again, deciding on live brushes or regular ones, dropping info to HD and back, then the program storing color info on voxels at times even when you didn't tell it to. Between all these things it's really hard to tell which combination of actions is causing what to happen.

I admire Andrew and this program is incredible work of art, however the complex workflow makes it really hard to isolate what might be causing a bug to happen unlike in other programs when you can think, "I did this, and then a bug happened" - so until the bug is fixed you can just work around it. With 3dCoat, I don't really know what is going on so it's not like I can tell him anything that would help him find the bug for himself, and it's not like I can just avoid doing whatever it was that caused the bug.

What button did I press? Probably all of them at some point or another. I can't tell you what is causing this.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Advanced Member

I also complained about this before with painting average size was 100-200 mb. The answer from Andrew was the color info stored really takes a big chunk of space. He could implement a compression during saving but I think the drawback is opening and handling of files will be slower due to compression. I just save increment and winrar previous file so it doesn't take too much hd space.

I think voxels,etc have the same problem so not sure what Andrew thinks about all this.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 6 months later...

The answer from Andrew was the color info stored really takes a big chunk of space

Its possible to set the UNDO steps by project ?

Its impossible to work with high textures.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Advanced Member

Yay for zombie thread resurrections! :)

ZBrush has gotten just as bad; especially now that users can save everything, including undo information, within one file. My 3D Coat test file, a pre-beta project from a while back which I've been using a lot lately for testing purposes, saved out at 582 MB in size using v4 and all it had was a high poly mesh (2,328,005 polygons, no UV's) and low poly retopo mesh (5184 quads, 3 UV sets); that's pretty much it, there is no color information at all.

Like the thread creator, kay_Eva, I save incrementally and often so this eats up storage space pretty fast. Thankfully I've found 7z compression actually works pretty well; those big 600 MB files become closer to 100 MB files for example, though that takes a little over a minute at the ultra setting which isn't exactly fast (test results below). I've wondered if it might not be feasible to implement 7z compression right into 3D Coat, complete with the option to choose compression level or disable it altogether depending on your patience. It is open source with a GNU LGPL license so I think that means Andrew could implement it if he wanted to (not really my area of expertise though).

Intel i7 3770K @ 4.5 GHz

Two 256 GB OCZ Vertex 4's in RAID-0

16 GB of PC3-12800 9-9-9-24 1.5v

Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 x64

9.22 beta / LZMA2 / 582 MB / .3b file

Fastest = 0m 5s / 149 MB

Fast = 0m 8s / 151 MB

Normal = 0m 46s / 134 MB

Maximum = 0m 51s / 133 MB

Ultra = 1m 06s / 134 MB

The first three took about 8 seconds to decompress. Thankfully Andrew improved file loading a lot with the more recent betas. This file used to take about a minute to load in 3D Coat, and now it only takes about six seconds. Adding just the fastest level of 7z compression/decompression alone wouldn't hamper performance all that much IMHO, and probably wouldn't even be noticeable for that matter. The benefit is pretty big too at about 4:1 savings ratio.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...