Forum - Craft Animations - 3d animation tools

3dsmax
So i have about 10 cars in the scene and around 4000 key frames to animate.
30 frames per second is the setup (could go with 15 but it wont help)

So when i finished animating car #1, my scene file size went from 5 MB to 50 MB.
I figured reducing KEYS might help so i gave it a try (First it takes very long time)
Second MAX will crash without finishing reduction.
Third Is there an option to have it keyframed every 5 or 10 keyframes instead of every single one ?
Or is there a way to reduce keys somehow other than the dopesheet or curve editor ?

Due to insane ammount of keys, max start lagging while animating other cars.

My specs:
INTEL P4 6700 Dual core 1670 mhz
4 gigs of RAM
plenty of space
OS located on Western Ddigital HDD at 10000 RPM for better speed

Actually there is a way to work around it but a feature that will take care of it is a must.

Basically the brakes or suspension do not need to be keyframed because they are linked to the object.
TurnBaseMesh
GravityDirectionMesh
WheelBottomMesh
CAMERAS
These and WHO knows how many others do not need to be keyframed and yet they do, making the scene file grow to large even for an autosave.

So what i would recommend is to delete all keyframes from meshes that you think you dont need to be animated such as once listed above.

Well, the thing with every plugin with Craft Tools is just that it´s build to be so accurate and close to the real world as possible with dynamics, pshysics and so on.
So yes, there is a lot of keyframes being build when you animate, it needs to be. But the more keyframes you decide to delete from different parts of the animated object the more less accurate it will be, plain and simple.

To decrease the number of keys to sample, temporarilly reduce your FPS settings to a lower value. CDT uses the current FPS setting as it's sampling rate. Once the recording is finished, you can set the FPS value back to your original one.
As Stefan already mentioned, this will of course reduce your animation detail. But if the loss is acceptable this is a good way to recude memory usage.
If you have already made a previous animation you can reduce the keys by setting the lower FPS value, then resimulate the tool. Note that this approach is not always foolproof though. Due to less simulation detail, the car might end up with a slight different behaviour than your previous animation.

Another method is to simply unplug the car once you're done with it. The tools usually use a large amount of internal memory and if you are finished with your animation, this information is no longer needed. Make sure you are absolutelly positive you are finished with the animation! Once you have unplugged a tool, it is not possible to re-record it!