Hi, Does anyone know how Bryce treats imported files when you store them locally ? I made myself a clean subfolder, added a ton of mesh I'd stuggled hard to keep under 30 mb all in all, and fancy my surprise when I see they bloated themselves up to over 100 Mb in the .obp The same with textures: Add a 1024x1024 jpg of a meg into the a blank .mat folder, and bam! mine grew to 3.6 Mb. So ah... what the heck does Bryce do when it stores imported files locally ? No wonder the mat-tiles it ships (shipped?) with are so small... Using Corel B5 ~S, somewhat confused...

(oh - and the meshes had no mats assigned to them, they were al greyscale) ~S

i think that in terms of meshes, at least internally, bryce triangulates all the faces of imports -or at least i've heard something to that effect. as for textures, it probably saves them with all the possible mapping information stored. i don't know, it sucks, i've noticed it too :/ drac

The image based textures all get converted to bitmaps, so thats where a lot of the size bloat comes from. For the meshes, I think they get triangulated or maybe made double sided or something - the polygon count in bryce is generally twice what I see as the polygon count before they go into bryce.

As far as I know, Bryce saves imported textures as uncompressed bitmaps :) Edit: I must be right then!!

Message edited on: 02/21/2005 18:49

is this being adressed in the new version?

Yup, Bryce triangulates all import polys that have more then 3 sides, which doubles the number of those polys and if present, the Normals and UVs. You'll save yourself some serious Bryce load time by triangulating before export from your modeler and most modern apps do a much better job of it then Bryce does, especially polys with greater then 4 sides (n-gons). Any images (including grayscale images) that are loaded into a color channel get converted to 16 bit RGB. Any image stored in the alpha channel is saved as 8 bit grayscale. Changing from tri mesh to quads ,or better yet n-gons, would affect a whole lot of the code in Bryce - certainly not what I'd expect from a"'dot" update like B5.5.

Thanks :-)
I was wondering whether it was me or not; I'd changed from .obj to .3ds in order to keep the filesizes to a minimum (that the gaming modeler in me ;-)) so I was really confused when I saw the bloat.

I hope this is a feature/fix in the next version - if nothing else, there could be an option for xrefs or external geometry calls.

I'd LOVE to know, at some point in time, what the hell the MetaCreations devs were -thinking-...

~S (edit for "next version"

Message edited on: 02/22/2005 08:33

Susan covers that in RWB actually. Given the evolution of Bryce that aspect came much later and had to be shoehorned into the code.

I have that book somewhere - havent opened it in a while, but I'll definitely go find THAT nugget :-) Thanks for all the answers, guys :-) ~S

i see now :D thanks!