I was working on a groom that had 7 or 8 Guide Groom nodes in a Hair Generate node which was generating just over 100,000 hair strands. That was probably my first mistake, since that contains all the dense hairs, but I was hoping to be able to tweak as I went along.

I noticed as I went along that saving my scene started taking longer and longer, and finally looked at the .hip file itself, which was >500MB(!). This scene so far is just a single model with <20k polys, so the hair seemed to be the prime suspect. Sure enough, each hair node was taking 50+MB. I wrote a python script to merge them all into one groom node by merging all the ‘strokes’ and ‘bakedstrokes’ parms and setting it on a single new object. This of course had some visual glitches due to the nodes in between the other groom nodes not occuring in the expected order.

Ultimately I scrapped everything but a couple procedural nodes in the hair generate (like clump/frizz), and am now back to trying to make everything translate over from the guide node.

So I'm not sure if this is a request for how to simplify/speed up my workflow or a feature request for a future way to compress/consolidate guide groom nodes.

EDIT: Wanted to also point out that removing the all the groom nodes definitely sped up my saving back to nearly instantaneous (instead of 10-15 seconds) and drastically reduced file size.