i am a bit baffled the way importing of obj in bryce playing tricks with me. whenever i import wavefront obj (max modelling) in bryce the resultant obp behaves erratically in terms of size. it always gives varying filesize. i canot stop myself from taking recourse to this forum when an obj ( 20 meg approx) modelled by me in  max  got  a staggering size of 60 meg as bryce obp. this is definitely  too much.. is anybody out there to help me out..

The bryce .obp will have all the texture information stored in it - that could be one reason its bloated up.

Another possible reason (which I'm not sure if its right or not) could be due to the type of mesh the obj is - maybe bryce has tripled a lot of your polygons, hence maybe doubling your poly count when it went from .obj to .obp. Couldn't say for sure though on that one, though I've often noticed that bryce thinks imported models have a lot more polygons than Lightwave (the source of my models)....sometimes by as much as a factor of 2.

correct me if I'm wrong, but Bryce imports object as 1 Bryce unit in size; a modelled toy truck will be the same size as a modeled real truck..;)  I think that might be part of it..

Flak is right, if the original .OBJ contained any quad polygons or n-gons, Bryce triangulates the polygons on import. So the total is the number of segments(sides) x 2. A n-gon Hex poly would become 16 triangulated polygons. Also as mentioned Bryce stores any external .OBJ image textures inside the .OBP as RBG. So in the current version of Bryce there's no way around this. Best; Dan

thanks flak,packled & dan for your bit of information. is it correct that too much boolean work in max does affect the size of the model and one should keep it to the minimum ? as i am still a beignner in max, i still resort to boolean habit of bryce modelling which i have been doing for couple of years. ... if it is so i must get rid of it for the sake of keeping filesize low..

I think the biggest thing to look out for when using boolean operations in other modelling programs is that it often creates n-gons - i.e. polygons in your mesh that have more than 4 sides. In general its a good idea to avoid having n-gons in a model - they often don't display properly when you import them into another application - I've had troubles with models I made in Lightwave that have n-gons which I have imported into Vue and bryce and poser not displaying properly. Quite a while ago, some much better modellers than I am warned me against using boolean operations ni general.

If you made your model in max out of nothing but tri's (three sided polygons) then your exported max file size should be similar to the bryce obp size, assuming they're both untextured. But then, if you made everything in max out of tri's you may find that the exported mesh is much bigger than if when you made it the way you do at the moment.  What you gain one way, you may lose in another.

What I do is I make all my models out of quads (4 sided polygons) and tri's if possible and then import that into bryce. Yeah, the saved bryce obp is bigger than the exported obj file, but it works and I can live with the increase in file size and the biggie - the model displays correctly.

Hopefully thats of some help.

thanks a lot  flak. it is really eye-opener for me.

I just discovered a wierd thing. I have been working on a Titanic model (imported low res 3DS with JPG texture images and I have added lots of booleans, primatives). The ship now has a large number of meshes, polys and textures on various surfaces. When I save the grouped ship object as an OBP file it is 11.6Mb in size.  When I save the scene file with the ship, the scene file is 5.2Mb.  Why is this so?  Have they rewritten the code for saving the scene file in a more economical way whilest leaving the export/save OBP with the old code perhaps? 

Anyone else experienced this?

If this is a feature of Bryce 6, then it will pay to always save the scene rather than just save the objects as OBPs...

I do not know about Max, but I seriously avoid boolean operations in Rhino because it does increase the file size dramatically.  I notice alot of items modeled in Max fly apart when imported into Bryce.

Yup - B6 automatically zips up Bryce files when saving but it also adds to the time it takes to save/reload (which can be significant with huge files). Both Mac and PC.