Best (Model-Editing) Way to Reduce Size

[Kyrbi0]

I've done a bit of searching, but I couldn't quite find what I was looking for.

So take any old given model. I want to make it smaller; how can I best do that? Specifically, in (rough) order what are the 'heaviest' parts of a model & what are the 'lightest'? Let's assume I can remove a variety of parts (animations/textures/meshes/geosets/vertices/texture animations/geoset animations/SFX/etc), and let's assume I've already linearized the whatchamacallits & mipmapped the horticulture.

So what's the hierarchy?

BIGGEST IMPACT
Animations?
Geosets?
Texture/Geoset Animations?
Textures?
Vertices
SMALLEST IMPACT

 

[PROXY]

I'm no expert but I'd say it depends on the quality of said part. Textures play a pretty big role I'd say, especially if they go up to higher quality.

Did a little resarch because you have woken up my interest. When removing the animations from a wc3 model, the filesize goes down merely by 1 or 2 kb. Makes sense too, as it is merely program code more then anything else.

The mesh itself does not play that of an important role too. When removing Thralls mesh he goes down from 165 kb to 139 kb. Not too significant.

After removing solely his bones he went straigt from 165 kb to ~30 kb. So the bones are probably the most data heavy stuff.

Removing his textures and materials only made him lose 1 kb.

So I guess you could rank it in this order:

Bones, Nodes, etc.
Geosets//Mesh
Textures (dependig on filesize of those)
Animations, Materials, etc.

For custom models you have to keep in mind that you have to import the textures too so they don't show their impact on the model itself but as their own file size.

 

[Tauer]

I'm no expert but I'd say it depends on the quality of said part. Textures play a pretty big role I'd say, especially if they go up to higher quality.

Did a little resarch because you have woken up my interest. When removing the animations from a wc3 model, the filesize goes down merely by 1 or 2 kb. Makes sense too, as it is merely program code more then anything else.

The mesh itself does not play that of an important role too. When removing Thralls mesh he goes down from 165 kb to 139 kb. Not too significant.

After removing solely his bones he went straigt from 165 kb to ~30 kb. So the bones are probably the most data heavy stuff.

Removing his textures and materials only made him lose 1 kb.

So I guess you could rank it in this order:

Bones, Nodes, etc.
Geosets//Mesh
Textures (dependig on filesize of those)
Animations, Materials, etc.

For custom models you have to keep in mind that you have to import the textures too so they don't show their impact on the model itself but as their own file size.

Textures are definately heavy yeah. But it's interesting that removing the animations didn't change the filesize for you, I just made a version of my Zul'jin model with the alternate animation set removed, and that shaved off about 170kb. So animations definately matter.

Maybe the way you deleted the animations simply deleted any reference to the anims, without actually deleting the data itself? That would also explain why deleting bones would help, seeing as that would remove all keyframe data as well. I don't see any reason why bones themselves would take up space, as they're basically just meshes/objects that have something attached to them. It would make more sense if it was the actual keyframe information that took up all that space.

But I'm not really an expert on this area either, someone like BlinkBoy would probably know more about this.

 

[GhostWolf]

Animations and textures are most heavy. If you removed an animation and it hardly reduced the size, it's because you simply removed the sequence metadata (name, length, etc.) and not the actual animation keyframes that are held by nodes.
I wrote this in the past.

You can also see how effective MDX optimizations are for your models (biggest game changer is replacing all bezier/hermite keyframes with linear, but floating point hacks also save lots of bytes, and maybe some useless keyframes here and there).
Shameless plug: a tool made by me does this.

 

[PROXY]

Of course, damn I'm an idiot ^^

Listen to Tauer and GhostWolf. The reason my method brought out these results was, because I deleted the stuff in Magos. And the keyframes of the animations are stored in the bones, not in the animations (which are indeed just name and length). Thanks for clarifying that guys.

 

[Stefan.K]

Yeah, I agree with GF and Tauer about the animations. Pure example are wow rip models that the mesh/vertices isn't really big considering file size, but rather is animations.
Bones, too. But definitely the animations have the biggest influence on file size, I think.

 

[Perdoshlep]

I dont see problem whis file size.Your models should use in campanigs,not in maps.Your models the best and i dont want that you cut their quality.Just do what you do,master.

 

[Kyrbi0]

Many thanks to all who offered help! To those Googling this thread, Hermit offered some useful guidance for a popular tool (in the same thread, GhostThruster shows us the harder-but-useful-IRL-way of doing the same thing).