Problem with copying vray lights from one scene to another (not possible)

[gunther_kleinert]

Hi,
I am having a problem with the lights of a scene.
I used "export selected" to save only the lights of a 3D scene ( a few ies lights with the ies file being 2KB and 2 simple rectangular lights).
Although this new file only having a couple of lights in it, it is 128 MB big and I dont know why... There is nothing else in it expect these lights.
Also I am having big problems to just copy these lights into a new empty scene. I ve been waiting 10 minutes and finally closed it as pasting them didn t work.
Even creating a new light within this file and trying to copy this one to another files doesn t work either
I have never had this issue before...


Any tip or advice is appreciated.
Thanks !!

Specs:
Rhino 7 SR 36
Vray 6.20.03
Windows 10
Nvidea Geforce RTX 3060, driver 31.0.15.5186

[nikolay.bakalov]

Hi,

The file you supplied opens quite slowly. The reason is that Rhino is searching for files. These are mostly texture files used in materials.

The reason for the slowdown in opening/saving and copying/pasting:

I see that you have deleted all materials from the model, however Rhino seem to not have automatically deleted the old ON_Material-s. Long story short - the modern Rhino materials (from Rhino 6 onwards) are backed up by the old material system from the OpenNURBS library.
Rhino usually deletes them on save. Every change to a "modern" material makes a new "old" material, discarding but not deleting the old one. With the time those material pile up and slow the things down a bit. In a local session there is no problem, since there is no file resolution, you eventually save your work and they got removed.
I'm not sure why that doesn't happen for you. In your case you have ~45K materials:



When I save the file on my end it shrinks down to around 2 MB. Both Rhino 7 and 8

What files those materials refer to ? in total all the files are ~74000 (some materials have more than one texture), but the unique files are 90. Around 55 of them are V-Ray viewport preview textures - .jpg files generated in place of the .tx files from V-Ray materials, which Rhino does not support), as well as the baked previews for V-Ray procedural textures.
all of those files are local - somewhere in the temp directory. Those are pretty fast to find (or rather find that they are missing). But there are also some other files, that V-Ray is not responsible to. Listed them here


The reason for the slowing down is that either drive F; server \\192.168.5.71 and/or server \\Admin-think are not currently available. Rhino is actually asking Windows to locate the files. Windows can't find them since the network location is not available (for some reason), however it takes ~20 sec for Windows to figure that out (there is a waiting time and a time out for network drives on an OS level)
The bulk of the open time is wasted searching for those 40-ish files. All of that is in vein, since none of the materials is used for something useful, but nevertheless Rhino is trying to find them.
When you copy/paste you essentially save the selection, but the destination is not a file on the disk, but the Windows clipboard. The process is exactly the same - thus you carry over those 45K materials with every copy/paste to your destination file, where Rhino is searching for those files again.

The reason for the the giant file size:

You have enabled the option to embed the textures inside the materials, and thus those 90 files (or some of them) got embedded in the .3dm file.
As I said I don't know why Rhino is saving all that for you, it shall rather discard all on save.

The Fix:

In order to clean your file, just use the Purge command.

you will see the 45K materials force removed

[gunther_kleinert]

Dear Nikolay,
thank you very much for the investigation and explanation on this. Also for the ourge command tip. ! I found out yesterday, when opening the file in Rhino 8 and copying / reopening in Rhino 7 afterwards, everything works fine.

Again, thank you for taking the time !
Best
Gunther