with.d3plot is with d3plot+d3sale (*DATABASE_SALE=1) wo.d3plot is with old d3plot only Please note: d3sale has fluid surface mesh generated and stored. so it stores more information than old d3plot way. to generate surface mesh, the old d3plot only database need lsprepost to do realtime calculation which might take long time. in this special case, d3sale file size is slightly larger than the old d3plot. this is because s-ale model only has 1 slice of elements and a lot of space is used to store the +z and -z surface fluid mesh. Otherwise d3plot database should be larger than d3sale.