How can I make 3ds files' size smaller?

Is there any way I can use to make the size of a 3ds file smaller?? I tried to change their length and width using 3dmax but the file size still开发者_JAVA百科 the same?? I'm using the 3ds files in creating an OpenGl scene so I need to shrink their size as small as I can, any suggestions??

To my knowledge the 3DS format is very well defined. The only way to reduce space is to either store less information or to compress it.

You could compress it with something such as LZ compression. There are lots of free LZ decompressors around.

This is more of a modeling problem than a programming dilema.
The width and height have nothing to do with the size of the 3ds file. What you store in 3ds files are vertex counts/positions/normals etc. Making a model smaller (in 3d size) won't make it smaller on the HDD because the same numbers of poligons are used and thus the same counts/position/normals. What differs is just a matrix which still uses 16 floats. What I can recommend is you study lowpoligon modeling or at least use the multires features in 3ds max. Reducing the number of polygons will make your filesize smaller and your program run faster at the cost of quality (this mostly depends on the skill of the modeler).

you can use vray proxy , xref objects, and 3ds max relax modifier. and for .max files itself, you can use winrar software.