How does Pixar optimize their USD file sizes to be so small?

Question

Husam2020 OP

Created Oct ’21

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Hello,

I downloaded the Pixar kitchen scene from Pixar and opened the rug asset as a USD file. It's about 26k polygons ( unsubdivided mesh ) and only 352kb in size.

Converting the rug to a Scenekit or OBJ file increases the file size to 3.7MB! About 10x larger !

How did Pixar manage to optimize/ export a 26k polygon model with a size of 352kb? Is this only possible using their Presto proprietary software ?

Is there special settings we need to used to export models created in Maya or 3ds Max with the same file size optimization? The Rug model is 3.7mb when exported as a USD file from 3ds Max.

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Answer 1

Graphics and Games Engineer OP

Apple

Oct ’21

USD files can be encoded in binary or ascii formats. However, I think most (or all) OBJs are ascii only, which produces larger file sizes than binary. I would guess that the files produced by Pixar are in binary, while the obj and SceneKit files are in ascii. Additionally, the SceneKit file might contain more information that is increasing the file size.

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