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symbols and file sizes


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I have a file roughly 3Mb in size which contains two small 3D buildings. I need to put multiple copies of the buildings into another drawing. I have defined them both as symbols and use the 3d symbol insert tool to place them. In the manual it states that an advantage of symbols is that the definition is stored only once and all that is required for each location is placement information (therefore keeping the file size small) yet after placing one of the symbols five times in the drawing the file size has jumped from 3Mb to 10.5Mb. Please could someone explain why as it is slowing down my work as the file quickly becomes too large to cope with. thanks for your time, Nick.

Vectorworks 9.5.2 on OS X 10.1.5

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I don't have an answer for the problem with symbols and file size, but I have a suggestion that may help. Either place one copy of the building or workgroup reference the original drawing. You can then use the layer-link command to place as many copies of the building as you need. Layer-linking does not seem to add much to file size.

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Thanks Kristen, I'll have a go with the workgroup referencing though I'm still puzzled about the symbols. Also the size of the file seems to jump around quite considerably depending whether solids are subtractions, additions or meshes etc. Does anyone know which type of solid is most efficient and whether that has any effect on render times? Might be barking up the wrong tree completely, but any thoughts are greatly appreciated, Nick.

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There are a lot of factors that come into play here.

A normal CSG solid (Addition, subtraction, intersection) stores the entire history of an object. Each time you perform one of these operations, the two objects used to create it are also stored inside.

If you have a lot or repeated solids operations on one object, you can build up a lot of redundant information.

A Mesh, 3D Polygon, or Nurbs based object just stores it's 3D geometry. These will have a minimum size.

In addition to this, VectorWorks itself will generate a cache of all the 3D geometry in your file. This is done for performance reasons, otherwise each CSG solid would have to be recalculated every time you changed views or opened the file. The cache itself can take up a large amount of space as well.

Complex 3D symbols use 1 instance of the geometry, but I believe these are cached separately. This is why multiple instances will cause a increase in file size.

So the bottom line is this... if you want small file sizes, you should compress the file as a .zip or a .sit.

Who knows, at some point in the future we may include file level compression built in.

Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

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