Just curious about some of your largest file sizes of .pz3's in Poser 4 out there.

My largest is just over 600 Mb, though it was done in Poser 5, not Poser 4.

I probably wouldn't have done it that way, except it was for a "no postwork" contest, so I couldn't do it in layers.

My largest that was actually rendered in P4 (well, PP, actually) was about 360 Mb.

Not really sure about my largest ever, but the largest I currently have on my hard drive is 49.5MB. I tend to strip everything unneeded out of a big project before rendering, to save memory. Of course, the PZ3 is usually only a small part of the equation. When you factor in the uncompressed bitmaps for all the textures, bumps, displacement, etc., you'll realise you're dealing with a much larger footprint. Which is why I often take advantage of tiling and procedurals. And then there's all that external geometry ....

Message edited on: 07/30/2005 16:05

600MBs? Wowzers! lol The largest one I could find right now is 100MB but I had one that was 155MB one time - boy was that fun trying to get that one to render! lol

Why Poser needs to save all the figures and props in Pz3's? I think that's a waste of space. It would be great if Poser could save only a reference to the HD and not the whole figure itself. Who needs tons of Vickys and Michaels and props and clothes saved over and over again in his hard drive? One of each inside the runtime folder is more than enough!

Reference to what exactly? Poser isn't storing the geometry in the PZ3, now is it? Nope. It's not storing the default CR2? Nope. It is storing the CR2 to keep all of the possible changes including materials, poses, transforms, morphs, morph injections, hierarchy, animation. The only thing that would significantly reduce PZ3 size is to not store the morph deltas, but reference them from the default CR2 and INJ channels instead. Poser 6 sort of does this, but not with a real solution. It just breaks the scene file into PZ3 and PMD files.

Message edited on: 07/30/2005 18:27

I once made a .pz3 that was 800 megs. Had about 7 V3's with all the morphs and 4000x4000 textures on them. Couldn't render it on my machine and I could barely move the camera around in fast mode.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=465795&Start=163&Artist=richardson&ByArtist=Yes

Message edited on: 07/30/2005 21:33

Wow. Did you really render that in one pass? How long did it take?

My largest PZ3 is 182 MGs.

Some of the old ones I made in Poser 5 are rather large, one is 190 MB. But with Poser 6 using compression and external morphs, I have a PZZ that is only 330 KB of the same character in a similar scene.

So, from the sounds of it, what is really needed to reduce Poser Scene file size is (without use of zlib compression - which works since ASCII text compresses very well): 1. Instead of storing the entire altered CR2, just store a reference to the CR2 (which in turn references the geometry and figure setup). 2. Include just the channels and other sections that have changed (like a Pose file). 3. Reference morph deltas from the original CR2 (see 1.) and any injection files. That would probably reduce many PZ3s by tens if not hundreds of MegaBytes. A scene just becomes the scene information, figure and prop alteration information, and references to figures and props used in the scene. The downside is that when you send someone a Poser scene, you'll also need to verify that they have the figures and props in question. This seems adequate.

The largest I can find is 458MB. I didn't render in one pass - I rarely do - I render the figures without scenery, sometimes splitting the figures into 3 or 4 separate renders, then the scenery, then composite in Photoshop.

The Poser scene file size and rendering are really not directly related. Rendering has to do with the amount of memory occupied by the scene when loaded (among other things). Now, yes, there is a correlation between the scene file size and difficulties in rendering, but this is only because the Poser scene file stores so much information (much of it redundant). Of course, one must also factor in geometry and textures as well as the fact that Poser doesn't 'instance'. Each V3 figure in a scene is a full V3 figure: individual geometries, textures, and CR2 details stuffed into memory.

Not sure. I compress my files in Poser which reduces the sizes considerably.

randym, If that's me you're asking then no. Not possible in one pass. I tried. I eventually split it up and rendered to the same window in several passes. It does seem crazy to store 22 identical meshes. Hope this gets solved someday.

Acadia, as I said, compressing ASCII text files is always beneficial to size reduction. But if you ever need to edit that hidden behemoth, you'll need to decompress it. And, voila!, it's back to 500MB. IMHO, it'd be better to save PZ3s uncompressed and just use WinZip or StuffIt to compress them if storage size is your only concern. Or, better yet, fix the problem at the root and optimize the PZ3 file format. This would of course bifurcate the format in order to retain older format support.

Robert... I am going to have to dig out a dictionary to decipher your post.... you got into things and words there that I'm not at all familiar with, hehe