Hi, I work with an architectural scene which is mostly modelled in Rhino (polysurfaces, nurbs geometry). These are mostly quite efficient.
I want to populate my scene with human models downloaded from external 3rd party vendors (they are all mesh models initially prepared in 3ds Max and made accessible in .obj format). I saved some of these individual human models as separate .3dm files. I then use the ‘Insert’ > ‘Block definition type: Linked’ to externally reference these human models in my main scene, expecting little to no file size increase in the main file. However, upon saving, I noticed that the file size increased significantly, and that increase roughly corresponds to the size of the mesh file that was being referenced. This makes me think that Rhino isn’t truly ‘referencing’ that file externally, but is saving the mesh geometry information into the main scene itself. This compounds to become a problem when I start to populate the scene with more than 20 different human models, each about 20-30mb in size. The scene easily bloats to 500mb and above, and takes forever to save. (despite all of them being ‘Linked’ externally)
Difficult to create a group of people, let alone larger crowds.
I did a separate test by Inserting an externally link block which only contains Rhino-native, NURBS-type geometry, i.e polysurfaces. This time, the file size increase in the main file is negligible - which makes me think the problem in my initial situation is due to the linked file being in Mesh geometry.
Do you guys encounter this and is this expected behaviour in Rhino?
How then would you advise me to achieve my goals of populating diverse human crowds in Rhino without inflating the file size?
Thank you.
