Slow Blender Import

Every time I import a .blend Unity slows down incredibly. This time Unity froze altogether. How do I avoid this or is it just a problem with my slow old computer.

 

Two questions for you:

1. Are you using Blender on a Mac?
2. Are you using one of the "bake texture" scripts for Blender?

If the answer to both questions is "yes", then I have run into the same problem. In my situation, it appears that the "temporary" files that the Blender scripts create to make a bake texture are saved inside the Blender .blend file and not deleted. I haven't figured out how to delete these files, inside a file yet, but I'm working on it.

 

Yes to the first. No to the second. Just plain ol' models in Blender. I got around it by saving as a .3ds, but that hasn't worked again for me since

 

Check the file size of your .blend, you will probably see that it's much bigger than it should be. I'm still experimenting, but will probably save to .OBJ if nothing else. .OBJ files at least maintain texture and UV information.

 

Slow for me too (on a G4) but it gets there in the end.

 

I don't know if the same problem happens with PPC builds of Blender, but I'm noticing that my .blend files are becoming -huge-. A single medium poly mesh (7000 polys) with no textures was 52 MB yesterday, ouch! It repeatedly crashed Unity (that's when I checked it's file size and realized something was wrong). I exported the same mesh as a 900 KB .OBJ file and Unity loaded it up nicely. There must be something wrong with the Mac (and possibly only the Macintel) build of Blender. I hope to investigate this today and file a bug report at blender.org.

 

I have a .blend file that includes four objects with a total of about 14,000 polys, and it's 1.6MB. So yeah, 52MB is kind of excessive. (I don't know that I'd call 7000 a "medium" poly mesh though...that's pretty huge by game standards, where you typically get the best performance at 1500-4000 per object.)

I'm afraid x86 Macs don't seem quite there yet across the board...I had access to several Intel iMacs a few months ago for a while, and they were exhibiting stability issues I've never seen on my PPC Power Mac. Despite claims of having the x86 build of OS X running "all along," I'm thinking there might have been a bit of a rush job to get it out...there has to be some reason the x86 OS updates have been so massive compared to the PPC versions; if all things were equal the code should be approximately the same size. Hopefully it will all get ironed out soon, or at least by the time Leopard is out.

--Eric

 

Regarding Blender file size: I'm doing some experimenting this morning (action followed by file size):

• "Suzanne" with no texture, 212 KB
  Subsurf level 2, 676 KB
  Created new procedural texture, 676 KB
  Ran "Self Shadow" script, 1.1 MB
  Ran UV Unwrap script, 1.1 MB
  Ran Texture Bake script, 7.7 MB
  Changed texture from procedural to UV map, 16.6 MB
  Changed texture from UV map to procedural, 25.9 MB

... and that's as far as I've gotten this morning. There is definitely something going wrong with Blender, the .blend shouldn't be bigger than 1.1 MB but yet it continues to grow. Also, the texture/AO baking method that worked for me yesterday doesn't want to work today... argh... Oh, BTW, my model size is 7000 polys because I'm testing texture baking, so I'm trying to get fairly clean textures and shadows. Final model will be much smaller.

Regarding OS-X and MacIntels: I'm still pretty new to this, but in the 2 months or so I've had my new iMac I've had more crashes than I've had with either XP Pro or Ubuntu Linux. Safari crashes all the time, and I'll probably switch to Firefox and see what happens. The Unity crashes I've had are probably due to the monsterous .blend file sizes, so it seems pretty stable. Although I'm enjoying OS-X and my iMac, it doesn't have anywhere's near the stability of Mac OS in the "old days".

 

UPDATE: I've reported the "increasing file size" on the Blender bug tracker. Hopefully it will get some attention before the next release.

In the mean time, the work around is this: open a new scene, "append" your old scene and select the meshes, materials, etc. you want imported and save your new scene file. When I did this I reduced my 30+ MB file down to 1 MB.

 

even a tiny file taking too long.