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3D Meshes and download file size

#1

Hello everyone,
I used to spend a lot of time simplifying 3D models, especially some furniture such as sofas and beds. They usually have very scary file sizes, and make my .SKP file reaches up to 1GB.

But today I noticed that inside the “Network” tab of the Chrome Developer Tools (F12), there are 2 files “face.buf” and “face16.buf”. They’re just 5MB each!

Do these 2 files contain all the meshes data? Does it mean I don’t have to spend time simplifying a toilet or a water tap?
In another scene, there is no “face.buf”, just “face16.buf”. Why?

Thank you!

edit-By the way, what does “Max Lightmaps” on the Bake tab means? What does it use for?

#2

Hi @Hill_Lam,

I am not sure how the .buf files work but I can assure you that optimizing mesh complexity pays off by lowering download times and increasing display performance.

Light in Shapespark is baked to static textures - lightmaps. “Max lightmaps” makes sure you don’t end up with too many lightmap textures that would also introduce to long download times and problems with display performance. When the allowed number of lightmaps would be exceeded lightmap resolution is automatically reduced.

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#3

@Hill_Lam the 3D geometry is stored in several .buf files, so you need add the sizes of these files to see how large is the geometry to download (besides faces.buf, there is vertices.buf, normals.buf, uvs0.buf, uvs1.buf, and usually much smaller: meshes.buf, transforms.buf, bounds.buf). The total size should be significantly smaller from the input .SKP file, but still, as Kuba pointed, it is often worth to optimize complex objects.

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