What is the biggest contributor to Poser file size?

I just found out that a product I bought cannot even be used in P9, cause of the size of it, and P9 is not 64 bit  (SM, where is that freakin sidegrade sale  >:O I am about to spend it all on Vue)....very aggravating.

Now I am very conscious of file size, and one file I have has just V4, hair, textures and clothes...and its about 200mb.

I used pretty big files when I was using 32 bit (and only 2GB of RAM), and not a very good graphics card either....

OK...I have 8gb ram, i7...but only P9, so it chokes and crashed when it hits 3.4gb memory used.

Wondering what's the bg contributor.  My guess is textures, but not sure?

Make sure you render in a separate process - if Poser shares it memory with the render engine you will run out pretty quickly in Poser 9.

Texture size is not as important anymore as in the past, but it still takes a large chunk of memory when rendering - another reason to render in a separate process

Morphs take up a whole lot of memory. A single V4 figure grows from 70MB memory to over 300MB if you add/inject all the morphs you have (assuming you have a lot of them)

Set texture preview size (render settings for preview) to 512 or lower. This will free up a considerable lot of memory

If you use displacement - do not use it at high values - this increases memory usage

If you can lower irradiance cache - this takes up a lot of memory as well (during rendering)

For Poser filesize itself does not matter - it is what objects and textures are loaded. If you compress and use PMD a scene can be very small, but still use a lot of memory

These are a few things which you  might check

Quote - Morphs take up a whole lot of memory. A single V4 figure grows from 70MB memory to over 300MB if you add/inject all the morphs you have (assuming you have a lot of them)

That's interesting. Do unused morphs also add to the memory overhead? And if so, is there an easy way to remove them?

There are separate scripts which will strip out unused morphs and they are freely available. 

Texture size can cause problems when imported into Poser.  I have had issues with skydome backgrounds that refused to load.  Better to evaluate these file types and downsize their resolution in Photoshop, GIMP, IRView, etc.  This is especially necessary if the textures are to be used for distant figures or objects.

Texture size adds up in memory, but they are only loaded when rendering. P8/P9 implemented a texture cache which decreases the need for memory. But with sparse memory it still uses a lot of it. A V4 has separate texture maps for body, head, limbs, inner mouth, eyes,eye lashes and possibly tears and their bump maps and in some case specular maps. In V4 a lot of them are often 4096x4096. Each taking up 32MB (If I recall correctly) - so that adds up pretty quickly.

There are a number of scripts which can remove the unused morphs. You can also let Scenefixer create a FBM inject file and then use that one on an empty V4 figure. Add the expression morphs again and you have a version which is a lot smaller

Thank you wimvdb.  Exactly what I was looking for!  Here's a cookie!  :)

Wow...I dropped the texture preview size to 128, and I can now load that object, and only use 2.5gb ram.  That's a full 1gb less memory, and it has not crashed yet!  Thanks again!

Quote - ...and it has not crashed yet! 

If I ever say something like that again, kick me.

OK, so I've got P9 setup for "Render in a Seperate Process", with number of threads set to 8 (i7)

Started a render...and the memory ramped from 2.5gb to 3.5gb and ran out of memory?

Never saw a new thread...was it just "preparing to send it to Firefly" and using the rest of my available single process 32 bit memory?  ...or a bug?

That is unusual.

So a few basic questions:

• What OS are you running?
• What are your render settings?
• And what do you have in that scene?

Depending on the answers, there are more questions

Forest Superior, and Andy.  Filesize, 3mb, so a lot of textures and simple objects.  (link)

Ok, that immediately answers all the questions

The Forest Superior is HUGE. On my PP2012 it takes 3GB upon load. The killer here is the number of polygons - it is wel over 4M polygons - which is 20 times as much as a V4 figure. There are several tree sections - each one well over 400K polygons and then the grass takes 600K polygons. I think you get the picture

You will not get that one into 32bit poser

You reduce on textures, but that won't be enough

Do a Scripts!PrintInfo!printGeomStats and you will get the picture

sigh... 

I wish there was a way to cut that thing in half. (or in quarters)  I mean, really, do you need all those trees at once?  Well I can open it and spin it around and keep it under 2.5mb, so I am gonna chop some forest and save some scenes! 

(...and keep waiting for the Poser Sidegrade sale, or the Vue sale, whichever comes first)

Texture caching (and lower memory consumption)  ONLY works if the texture filtering is set to quality or crisp on all the textures loaded.

If at render time your memory jumps out of control, check that you have NO textures set at Texture filtering NONE !

**That goes for all textures.
**
Trees?
Do you have tree transmaps set at texture filtering NONE???

Set all textures to crisp, and check again.

OK, scene fixer = set whole scene to texture Crisp, and retrying....