Hi,

I'm often working with files that were created in AD Inventor and then exported in the IGES format. The file sent to me today was in a zipped format at just 3MB in size. Unzipping it gave me a 32MB IGES file which I was then able to import (very slowly) into MoI. I saved this file without any changes using the 3dm format and was surprised to see it had grown to over 174MB!

Why does this happen? Is 3dm an inefficient file format? Where did all the extra data come from?

Mark

Hi Mark, the file size increase is most likely because of a heavy use of repeated instanced data in the file.

MoI does not currently have any mechanism in it to represent instanced data and so those get converted into separate full object copies at import time, and that can increase the data size by quite a bit.

I do want to add an instancing mechanism into MoI to avoid that from happening but currently that's probably what is going on there.

- Michael

If you ZIP a 3dm file, you win some place for send or share the file for example! :)