Heavy Files - Solution

Hi everyone!
Does anyone know of a solution/ tip/ trick or something when GH files get really heavy??? Same question for Rhino as well. I did try the save small thingy in rhino but it didnt improve anything!
Many Thanks!

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Permalink Reply by Suryansh Chandra on December 6, 2009 at 4:33pm

For Rhino, its just a matter of a lot of geometry being stored in the file... some purging and deleting unrequired objects might help. Also turn off most things you don't need/use frequently.

For GH, do you mean the file size or the performance/interactivity?

If its performance, I would suggest turning preview off for as many components as possible, and small but clever tweaks that sometimes come with experience.. like using much less components to do the same operations. Also, I try to delay surface/polysurface creation/manipulation operations till the last possible moment, and deal with points/lines/curves/vectors for as long as possible (but ofcourse thats not always possible).

Normally, surface/polysurface manipulation operations like intersection/trimming/morphing are things that tend to be intensive calculations that terribly slow down the entire system... there's no definite workarounds to such a problem, because sometimes you just need them. What you really can do is keep them to a minimum, and use them as late in your definition as possible.

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Permalink Reply by Deepthi on December 8, 2009 at 12:52pm

Thanks Suryansh! I was hoping that theres a quick solution and maybe I am doing something wrong or something :P Necessary evil!

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Permalink Reply by Sameer Kumar on December 6, 2009 at 8:08pm

When working with very large definitions, one of the problems I was having was with refresh rate of the canvas. Moving around the canvas was getting quite sluggish. One thing that helped a lot was turning off the compass widget. According to David, a large part of the refresh slowing was attributable to the compass widget.

Hope that helps.

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Permalink Reply by Deepthi on December 8, 2009 at 12:54pm

Ah! Thats interesting! Thanks a lot Sameer :)

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Permalink Reply by Theunis du Toit on December 8, 2009 at 3:01pm

Do you mean for sending files as well? If that is the case save small and then compress using winrar or winzip which works very well for Rhino, I have compressed files from 100mb down to about 4mb. I have not tried it for Grasshopper yet.

For interface speed in Rhino I find a bit of Layer management goes a long way, switching preview off for everything I don't use.

Simple advice, maybe it can be useful.

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Permalink Reply by Deepthi on December 11, 2009 at 3:49pm

Oh I didnt know that we can compress to that extent! Thats a very useful tip!
I do use layers in Rhino... I guess my file itself was that heavy!
Thanks a lot

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Permalink Reply by Benjamin Golder on December 13, 2009 at 5:17pm

In Rhino, try SelDup and Purge to get rid of unused items. And generally, while developing a project, it can be helpful to use a series of incremental saves as you develop your model, while deleting geometry you are no longer using. With incremental save, it is easy to go back and find any particular previous version of your model.

In Grasshopper, I sometimes chop up really big definitions, and just bake some intermediate geometry that I can feed into the next definition. I find that cutting a huge definition in half make enormous gains on speed. It is more of an exponential relationship than a direct one it seems.

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Permalink Reply by Deepthi on December 13, 2009 at 5:40pm

Thanks for the reply Benjamin! I didnt know about the SelDup command. I do purge but havent used incremental save yet - will have to start though! Ya baking stuff half way through - I have started doing that too, which had left me wondering whether that means that they are not parametric anymore?!...

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Permalink Reply by BenjaminMoore on December 15, 2009 at 3:28pm

I'm having a similar problem, mostly with grasshopper files. I'll start a grasshopper patch, and start adding to it or just tweaking some sliders and then I'll save it. Eventually I'll close it and I'll never be able to open the grasshopper file again. I'll try opening the grasshopper file but it just takes forever to load and simply doesn't open. So it just ends up freezing. Any similar experiences and suggestions?
Many thanks guys.

Oh and the big/complex geometries are NOT on preview so it's not like it's having a hard time with that. I guess there still could be a lot of "invisible" data processing going on...