Wish: pack scene without save for fresh opened files

[Micha]

Hi,

for example I have a large 2GB Rhino file and I want to pack and send it someone. Simple open and pack should be possible, an additional save cost unnecessary time.

And please allow to save rar files. An example ZIP 341MB and RAR 250MB.

-Micha

[nikolay.bakalov]

Rar is not free for compression. Allowing rar files, means we need to pay royalties to RARLabs. That mean more expensive V-Ray.

the difference in the compressed size might be due to the compression level and/or other options.

the packer packs actual files from the disk. If your file is modified you will pack a different thing than what's on the screen. That is not good approach.

if freshly opened file is marked as modified - that's a different story.

[Micha]

I did a test and pack the data per ZIP in 'best' mode -> 337MB. So, it's still not a good compression. ZIP seems to be not so good anymore.

But an other run was interesting - the winner is the free 7zip (mode: ultra) -> 236MB. In 'normal' compression it's also better than RAR/ZIP-> 241MB. I know that other companies are using 7zip as packer too, so I hope it's a free tool. Would be great if 7zip could be used instead ZIP. It's good for short upload times and could help to stay within the Email-attachment limit.

----

So I hope packing fresh opened scenes can be fixed.

[nikolay.bakalov]

Are you sure about your test ?
I wouldn't believe it that much. It is only one test, with one specific file set. The results might be different with different files.

We used to use 7zip until a few versions ago, and I'm glad we dropped it. It is still part of our package (C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\V-Ray\V-Ray for Rhinoceros\tools\7za.exe), and it is used to decompress the appsdk swarm pack. The tool isn't bad, the problem is that it is a batch tool.
There is no much control, and it sometimes crashes. Patching error report to the user is kind of nightmare. We used to have a lot of problems packing the scene, because of how 7za puts the files in the archive.
Now using the compression library directly things are looking significantly better. Much less of a code and tons of problems out.

Archiving is not just up to file size. It used to be the case 20 years ago, when 3KB/s download over the internet was unseen before (I had 56K modem, and was very happy with that speed). Nowadays squeezing every bit is not that much relevant. What matters more is speed and convinience.
The file extension and the tool doesn't really matter either. It is all about the algorithm. 7z has LZMA as default (but can compress/decompress many more). zlib uses DEFLATE by default, but can handle LZMA and many more as well. So it is all about setting the right flags to the library
The compression level also matters to some extend, but not that much.

Currently we're using DEFLATE with DEFAULT compression level. I tried DEFLATE/MAX but got the same file size.
Tried to switch to LZMA/DEFAULT and LZMA/MAX and got the file size 2K smaller. That is merely 0.3%.
Tried 7z manually over the same file set and got exactly the same results.
With different file set it would be much different, of course, so such kind of measurement is not telling anything.

I'd suggest you take a look at that 337MB zip archive and check the compression levels. compare them with the 236 MB file size and check where it differs
Images usually compresses very little (unless you have tons of bmp files).. 3dm files compress better, since thy have tons of embedded XML in them, and plain English text compresses the best.
Since the bulk of the files are images the overall difference would not be that much for the majority of the cases.

[Micha]

The compression rate often decide can the file easy send per email or do I need to use file sharing. Also scenes are more complex than years before and often my Rhino files are 1GB or above. Rhino files can be good compressed and a strong packer can save a lot. My test file was a heavy Rhino file with some maps.

OK, if it's not that easy to switch to 7zip, then I'll live with the larger files.

[nikolay.bakalov]

Sending large archive thru mail ?
you shall never do that. For security reasons.at least

I'll try to switch to lzma and check a wider file sets.
meanwhile you can further compress the .zip archive with 7z to get an archive inside another archive. I guess you will get 2-3% more ratio. This is quite common in the Unix world

[Micha]

Often data are not so confidential that email can't be used here. Here an example of a smaller Rhino scene as a bug report:

* ZIP 33 MB -> quite big for email
* RAR 11MB -> good size for email
* ZIP in 7ZIP 32,7MB-> ....

This are typical results I see often here. ZIP is much bigger than RAR.