Substance Painter HUGE files

rage288

Im having an issue with a painter file thas has gotten HUGE, like more than 4,5 GB
Thing is I baked normal in 8k and the rest all in 4k.... then I did some work (file was like 2 GB) then Ive tried baking all in 8k (except for AO) and the file doubled so I dismissed it for being impractical to send later and went back to 4 k maps (except for normal wich is still 8k) and the file has gotten even bigger instead of returning to the 2 Gb mark.
As a sidenote Ive never worked the texturesets in more than 4k inside susbtance only baked the source textures in that res (im supposed to author all double the final size just in case thats why Ive baked NM in 8k) but always worked in 4k

Any tips on how to get it back to a more manageable size like before?

Cheers!

Axel

LudoP

Hi Axel, 

When you're doing multiple bake,  you will have to clean the project to purge the unused bakes because of the remaining fragmentation. You will have empty space unused, but still present in the project.

I'll recommend you to go into the "File" Menu, "Clean". After that you can "Save & Compact" if you're using atleast a Substance Painter 2018.2.0 version. Save & Compact option will clean the project anyway, but wanted to give you all the possibility about how to process to fix this kind of issue. 

Let me know if you're still having trouble after following the steps above.

Cheers, 

Ludovic

rage288

Thx dude!
Im using 2018.1.1     :I 

Revel

For older version just save you painter file on Desktop or other location other then what you currently at, it will magically reduce the file size and just copy that back into the location you needed.

rage288

Thx. I'll try that as soon as I can! 

poopipe

You can clean on 2018.1.1 

 it's not safe to use on the later 2017 versions (use save as) but they fixed it fairly quickly. 

LudoP

I was talking about the Save & Compact for the Substance Painter 2018.2.0 feature, you can clean and save, it will react the same way !

rage288

@LudoP and @poopipe I tried the clean feature and the file remained exactly the same

Zack Maxwell

4k is still incredibly large. Unless you have a large 4k monitor, the object would literally have to be significantly larger than the entire viewport for you to see any difference between 4k and 2k.
Last I knew, I was quite sure 4k+ textures were reserved for atlases and terrain.

rage288

Zack Maxwell said:

4k is still incredibly large. Unless you have a large 4k monitor, the object would literally have to be significantly larger than the entire viewport for you to see any difference between 4k and 2k.
Last I knew, I was quite sure 4k+ textures were reserved for atlases and terrain.

Naaa, for Hero Assets like for example guns in an fps, 4K is pretty much the norm

Zack Maxwell

rage288 said:

Zack Maxwell said:

4k is still incredibly large. Unless you have a large 4k monitor, the object would literally have to be significantly larger than the entire viewport for you to see any difference between 4k and 2k.
Last I knew, I was quite sure 4k+ textures were reserved for atlases and terrain.

Naaa, for Hero Assets like for example guns in an fps, 4K is pretty much the norm

Wait, really? 4k monitors are still very rare, and it's actually impossible for a gun in an FPS to occupy enough screenspace to see any difference with a 4k texture.
Even in the extreme case that the gun occupied half the screen, it would have to be so massive that you can only see 1/4 of it at any time.
In fact, it being on screen at all times makes the waste that much more severe, since they have to proportionally reduce literally everything else in the game to compensate.

rage288

The 4k texture is only visible when very close to camera the rest of the time some of the mip maps are showing, but yeah 4k is commonplace nowadays, at least for PC. 

oblomov

Did you "clean" and "save as..." (not saved in the same file) ?

rage288

oblomov said:

Did you "clean" and "save as..." (not saved in the same file) ?

Ive just had the opportunity to do that AND IT WORKED!
File went back even lighter than ever before at 1.2 GB
Thanks @oblomov and @Revel for the suggestion!

I wonder why this is so... 
Anyone knows??

Revel

Lol yeah nobody knows why, and the Save&Compact feature on the latest Painter basically do this but on a single step (as if you were just normally ctrl+s, but took slightly longer). Normally I just did this once at the end of my texturing session each to keep the file size in control

poopipe

The files are big because of  cached resources which are stripped when you do save as.

Simply put, everything you add to a painter project is saved with it so file sizes can inflate rapidly. 

2018.1 also has a fun bug where file size increases every time you save even if you make no changes.

You could(haven't checked 2018.2) reduce file size by reducing resolution before saving.   

Just FYI.. A lot of this is documented on the Allegorithmic website

Burpee

that'd be great to have the option to save all the ressoure somewhere on the disk and link them to the project

TheGabmeister

Just found this thread. Good info. I was having similar problems.

oraeles77

just posting a comment, so I remember to come back and check this page in the future

saleemarani

Good Info.... I'm a newbie to substance and I have this huge file size issue....