max file sizes

stoofoo

Anyone have any handy dandy scripts or information on how one might reduce a .max file size? It's currently 41 megabytes and is actually only 3 bipeds and some custom bones with the associated characters. It needs to be sent out for outsourcing today. I tried ths gc() thing and have tried all manner of other things, nothing seems to work. Any othe ideas?

Eric Chadwick

Unhide everything, unfreeze everything, see if there's any other data.

How heavy are the modifier stacks? If you have multiple Edit Poly or Edit Mesh modifiers, they balloon file size since each one stores the entire mesh.

Also try resetting, then merging in the items you want. Sometimes this clears out hidden data.

stoofoo

So we spent a long damned time on this last night trying to figure it out. We narrowed it down to the biped being the problem last night, but any time we created a biped in the scene it would go from a 1 meg file to 40+

It turns out it is the max file collecting all the data from copied poses etc on each biped. I deleted that collection and now its down to 1 meg. All I have to say is "wow."

Eric Chadwick

Ouch. Glad you figured it out though.

Ah so it was a bunch of animation layers on each Biped? I haven't used the new Biped stuff yet. But it sounds like this is a similar issue to having a ton of layers in a 1024^2 PSD file, each layer balloons the size.