Blender file with most of the content linked is suspiciously large in file size

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1

I’m working on a housing project and have linked most of the stuff in the file from library files (materials, trees, furniture etc.) but still for some reason the master file is 1.4 GB in file size. I’ve purged all orphan data and checked that everything is still linked but I can’t figure out why the file is so large.

Any tips on how to investigate what is taking all that space and how to fix it?

2

Hi,

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/67630/blender-file-size-grows-and-never-shrinks

3

Please activate all objects in the scene and activate Statistics to check the scene object information. Note that the size of the file used in the image is 64mb.

erwe

※ The amount of polygons accounts for a significant portion of the saved files.

4

This is with everything enabled:

image

5

I tested it because I didn’t understand it well. :sweat_smile:

I attached the above file to the new project via Link and saved it. The result is 1mb.
Test blender 3.6.5

I don’t know exactly without checking the file
You can also move files to a new project. :thinking:

Add…

The modeling file that uses a similar amount of vertices in my working file is 370mb.
The file capacity that you don’t understand seems to be correct. :sweat_smile:

6

You may check “Compress File” option in Save & Load settings in Blender Preferences (Edit - > Preferences). It will help you to reduce actual .blend size when saving it.

Another thing you could do is to check “Show Hidden Files/Data-Blocks” in that same tab. I’m not sure what it does, but maybe it would help you as well.

image
image661×551 45.4 KB

I just found out that I dealt with the similar question here, some moons ago (see here), there’s an add-on called “Atomic Data Manager” which could help you to understand why your file is so big and what you can remove from it in order to make it a bit lighter. It’s free. Here’s an official link to download it.

Hope that helps

Cheers,
Sergey

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7

Thanks, I’ll go through the similar posts later today and maybe try the data manager as well. I’ll report my findings here as well once and hopefully a solution what helped me.

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8

Coming back to this in case someone else runs into similar situation. After cleaning the file it shrink from 1.4GB to 420MB.

There was at least four main things what caused the huge filesize in my case:

  1. I had accidentally imported some trees from botaniq with “make editable” enabled
  2. Few high poly boulders were accidentally appended in the file and they were copied around a lot
  3. I imported few models from Blenderkit and did not notice they do not insert as linked assets
  4. When I was inspecting the file from some other outliner mode, I found that there were a lot of “local components” of previous assets embeded in the file. I don’t know what they are called and don’t really understand how this works but they did not disappear when purging orphan data, even though they were not used anywhere in the scenes. I deleted them manually from the outliner.

Also learned it the hard way that if you create a new workspace with asset browser, the default setting for inserting assets is “Follow preferences” even though I’ve selected “Link” in another workspace.

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