Forum: Poser Technical


Subject: Dealing with big BUMs

_dodger opened this issue on Dec 16, 2002 ยท 12 posts


_dodger posted Wed, 18 December 2002 at 7:46 PM

Allow me to amend my proposal: For convenience's sake, it's a better idea to simply ZIP everything up side by side so the that the PPP_P5_Bump Folder and the P4_Bump folder aren't seperately compressed. That way you can include the original greyscale bumpmaps in a subfolder in the 'normal' Textures subfolder, and not increase the filesize by more than a few bytes due to the way file compression works. Here's the scoop: When a file is ZIPped (or Stuffitted or tar.gzipped or RARred or whatnot) it's stuck into a single file which is then compressed as a single file, which saves space over seperately compressing them. If you have a ZIP file inside a ZIP file, it doesn't compress any further. However, if you have two identical files inside a single ZIP, the result isn't much bigger than compresing only one -- you just double the symbol table entry for the uniques inside the file sector. Thus if you ZIP up all the PPP/P5 Bumpmaps and also include those same JPEG bumpmaps in the main section in a subfolder, you're getting twice the size for those files that you otherwise would -- because the already ZIPPed compressed binary isn't the same as the not-yet compressed JPEGs in the original bumpmap folder. In simpler terms, since JPEGs don't compress, they only archive (already being about as compressed as you can get and more compresssed than the non-lossy archiving algorithms allow) a ZIP containing only a 60kb JPEG will usually weigh in around 61-62kb. A JPEG containing 2 copies of the same 60kb JPEG will weight in around 65k, because the contents are duplicate and can be compressed to 50% plus the symbol table. A JPEG containing a 60kb JPEG and a ZIP of that same 60kb JPEG, however, isn't two copies of the same thing, as one is 'compressed' or at least archived with a relatively useless symbol table. Thus it will weigh in around 125-130kb generally. I think RAR does better and outsmarts this, but no one uses RAR here.