I have made a crystal structure for my thesis in illustrator. I used a half circle to generate nice spheres using Illustrator's 3D effect:
Now the problem is that the filesize is huge: 40MB when saved as PDF (the format i am importing in to Latex), 25MB as .ai and a little less for an svg. How can I get a decent file size? Is there a way to 'rasterize' the 3D effect or compress it somehow?