How to Return to a Small File after already making it Way Too Big?

Rhino
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1

Club-Castelli_014.3dm (19.0 MB)
Attached is the last time that the file was under the 20MB upload limit.

But to truly comprehend the enormity of my dilemma, all 1675GB of it, you’ll need to pull the file from this Google Drive link.

I’ve got two questions, please:

The first is, after you’ve already gone and created an enormous file by importing meshes, moving them, copying them, after you’ve already done everything wrong, how do you repair your file to get it back to a reasonable size? Save Small doesn’t help.

The second is, what’s a better workflow so that I don’t do this to myself ever again?

I would like to create some renders in TwinMotion. I’ve tried V-Ray, and that’s very convenient because it’s all inside Rhino, but it’s subscription model, so I would prefer to work with TwinMotion. This file is just too big to work between the two programmes.

Next time, I won’t have any furniture or vegetation or human figures, because I can put them in with TwinMotion at the time of render. I won’t use any meshes, only SubD and NURBS. Still, to get enough stuff in the neighbourhood to make realistic renders, the file’s pretty big.

Earlier in the year, I had the same problem with the building on the other side of the block (that the two lots connect together, with the garage access underneath it), generating way too big of a file. But at that point I didn’t know anything at all, so this building in the front has a few less problems. At that time, even just exporting geometry alone, and exporting small, would produce giant files.

We’re coming into a new year here, and I would like to really start getting good at this. They don’t teach us any CAD in school; it’s all hand-bombed, so there’s no teachers to ask. Please and thank you.

PS: the lot is at -34.941930, -57.952043

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1.7 GB, not 1.7 TB…

At any rate…

You’d have to define “wrong”.

If you have been working on a file for a while, it’s likely you have saved it several times before getting to a point where you need to get to a “better” version.

You should make sure to always have backups of important files at critical points in the design workflow.

If you don’t manually keep track of such important milestones, Rhino will move previous versions to the trash can and you should be able to find a version that is “better”.
-wim

3

Thank you for your response. You’ll see from the naming conventions, the 014 in the uploaded version, and the 080 in the linked version, that I had been doing that. There’s actually 88 versions total, but the last 8 are things like clipping planes and animation paths, that I figured weren’t relevant to the discussion. You’ll see in 014, that there’s not much there to work with in terms of rendering. I suppose I go back to the file just before I imported the mesh chair (even having converted it to SubD), and paste into it the stuff that I built after the mesh imports, yeah?

4

Hi Balthasar

Or simply just delete that imported chair?
-wim

5

As far as I can tell, that doesn’t work. Once the file gets big, it doesn’t get smaller; it’s almost like, and I’m just guessing, all the imports, moves, copies, pastes, more moves, and deletes, are saved into the History or something.

6

Hi Balthasar -

Have you tried the Purge command after deleting something?
-wim

1 Like
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Thanks, Wim. No, I hadn’t. I’ve deleted all the landscaping and all the imported furniture (I have to leave the Atlantes holding up the building on the other side of the block though). I’ve purged all the everything, and I’ve got it down to 801,979 KB. This is a good, new, command to learn. Thank you.

801979KB
801979KB767×219 20.9 KB

I think next, I will try exporting a view to TwinMotion rather than trying it sync’d. It’s still really big, right? But still, that’s good information, that new command for me. Thank you.