When you select polygons in edit mode and save your file, Blender saves your selection. But no matter what is selected, the file size is exactly the same (I tested with a very high poly sphere).
To me this means that each component (vert, edge, face) is associated with a “selection” data that is either “on” or “off”, but wether it’s on or off, the amount of data won’t change.
In other words, in a component data array, you have an additional column for “Selection”.
In big scenes this is probably a big deal. If you could delete that column you could save a lot of memory !
Is there a way to do that ?
did u try with compress option ?
happy bl
I doubt it would save all that much memory but deleting and recreating the data when needed would slow Blender down and clutter the interface. Remember that this is flag data, 0 or 1, a single bit can store that, not a full byte, so actually the amount of memory saved would be tiny compared to the x,y,z & u,v coordinates stored for each vertex, each of which is probably a 64 bit or 128 bit floating point number. For a tiny fraction of one percent memory saving you would be making Blender more complicated and therefore harder to debug. Not worth it in my view.
Thanks for your replies.
Checking the “Compress” option in the User Prefs doesn’t change that.
But I guess you’re right Fire_Angel, I didn’t see it from that angle.