I am looking to shrink down the file of a custom Sword .Obj that I made, it's so big that it freezes my Bryce & Poser. I am new to modeling in 3D on the Computer, & my very detailed Sword is one Giant file (83,230 KB) ! I can view it in Poser but after a while it freezes, I want to make it smaller so I can use it in images. Any help would be appreciated ! dwmdesigner

hmm...thats a big sword, I mean really really big for a sword, good god, there is only so much detail you can put into a sword. What program did you model the sword with???

you might want to try the 3ds format its usually a lot smaller than the obj format...

Does the format matter? It's still the same mesh; it'll eat up the same amount of memory once loaded, right? dwmdesigner, can you post a pic of this sword? I'd like to see the mesh before you start trimming it down. For the record, the largest .obj I've ever seen in Poser is Questor's Terminator character, which has a lot of moving machined parts, and it's only 15MB.

i would have to imagine that the detail is in the handle and guard of so then the blade is probally high jut because of the poly maping meanin gmakin it on e nice messh if so you could alwasycut it into towo remodel the blad and reatch it ? i agree though you should post a wireframe and we could probaly help you more

A lot of your detail can probably be removed from the actual geometry and simulated with bump mapping... just a tip.

... I agree with Val. I have some VERY detailed props that I HAD to reduce the geometry in order not exceed memory constraints of some of the software that I use. The details could be picked up again (after reducing the geo file) by detailed tex and bum maps. Total memory used was considerably less than with a complex geo file. Play with it and you'll find that detailing a prop with tex maps can produce very realistic looking models. (and is much easier to modify - not that we ever need to change anything ;=])
cheers,
dr geep ;=]

P.S. to Travis ... breaking it into 2 .obj files would still take as much memory when loaded as an .obj file that is twice as large. (imvho - icbw) ;=]

That's the Conan movie sword. Beautiful job. They're right; a lot of the fine detail on the guard, pommel, and ricasso can be simulated with bump maps. The simple shape of the blade itself can be relatively low-poly, also.

Without a doubt, 90$ of that detail can be a bump map. The sword, itself, likely needs to be only about perhaps 2000 faces at most, or only a couple hundred K.

Just to let everyone know I re-did the 3d Rendered Conan movie sword, so I can use texture maps & bumpmaps to create the details. I will have it done within the week, unless something unexpected happens. I will offer the Sword -Free- to everyone on Renderosity, and when it is finished I will have a complete Conan too ! Thanks to everyone for taking the time to answer all my newbie questions, I really like all the free tutorials, textures and Props that you guys/gals have created, so since I am a big Conan fan, I had to create both the sword and the Barbarian himself . If anyone has a challenge(something to model), let me know, 3D modeling is really fun, especially when you see the end result! Dwmdesigner