Huge Illustrator file after using 3D effect to generate a sphere

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:

enter image description here

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?

Answer

What do you mean by 3D effect? You could always just create those spheres by placing a radial gradient inside a circular path. This would be the simplest method to do this.

sphere

Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : ElDoe , Answer Author : Manly

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