Compressing methods for caches

[lazza79]

Hi Guys,

I am literally running out of space and I would like to ask you a question:

During one of the workshop I followed, the tutor suggested to use the extension "bgeo.sc".
I previously used "bgeo.gz".

Does anybody know which one is the best and why?

Cheers!

Andrea

[Skybar]

bgeo.sc is newer with H15 I think? 

If you are caching volumes, converting to VDB and saving as 16-bit saves roughly half the space usually. If you are saving points/geometry, delete any attributes that you won't be needing before caching.

[symek]

bgeo.sc is blosc based compression which is way faster than gzip, although might be bigger on disk. Other than that, Skybar advice is worth adopting. 

[dimovfx]

I did some tests before, and concluded that .sc is much faster for read/write operations maintaining almost the same compression ratio as .gz

[lazza79]

Thank you guys!

[Adam Ferestad]

I actually just wrote a blog post on this topic. The basic gist is to delete any attributes or fields that you don't need for your purposes.  In particular, get rid of vectors.  They take up so much space.  So vel fields and attributes if you are not guiding geometry or driving any other systems with it, or temperature/heat/fuel fields if you aren't using them for shading.  It is really just about using only what is needed.  There is also an option for compressing fields on Pyro sims, but I haven't played with that one yet.

[lukeiamyourfather]

Velocity is usually considered mandatory because it's used for motion blur at render time.

[Skybar]

Yeah I wouldn't get rid of the vel field if the volume is going to be rendered. You can however mask it to only keep the interesting areas to save space, if it's only needed for motion blur.

[Guest tar]

You could even just calculate motion vectors in Nuke with the MotionBlur plug-in. Not as accurate but certainly can do in a pinch!