.blender compression, internal and external

Parad0x13 · Post by **Parad0x13** » Thu Feb 07, 2013 2:21 am

Experiment: Attempt to compress .blend files as much as possible
Compare Blenders internal compression system to an external opensourse lightweight compression system (7za/p7zip)

Default Scene (Blender 2.65):
Uncompressed.blend: 452K
InternalCompress.blend: 80K
7za a -mx9 Uncompressed.7z Uncompressed.blend: 48K
7za a -mx9 InternalCompress.7z InternalCompress.blend: 72K

You can see that 7z compression of UNcompressed .blends was better than 7za compression of internally compressed .blends (and this does make sense). Also its apparant to see that compression using 7z is much better than Blender's internal compression algorithms.

I won't go into too much more detail but I tested a myriad of different .blend files some simple meshes and some complicated and very detailed meshes. The conclusion was the same, 7z compression of UNcompressed .blends gave the best results. Sometimes the results were drastically smaller than the internally compressed results.

Questions for you all, what internal compression algorithms are used in Blender and would it be too difficult to incorperate this freeware 7z to act as Blenders internal compression suite?

Many thanks for all your input! Cheers!

Post by **stiv** » Thu Feb 07, 2013 5:52 am

Blender uses zlib, I believe - same stuff a gzip.

You left off the timing data for creating the files.