CompuServe Thread

#3D Studio

2 messages in this thread
#187568From: Chris J. WynnAug 27, 1995 11:17 PM
Dear Jonas, I have a slight problem with 3D Studio, and I was hoping you might be able to help me. It has happened twice now, and the one time it practicly ruined my life. I am a student at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, and I had to do a project using 3D Studio. We had 11 weeks to finish the project. Anyways I was just finishing up a minute and a half animation the night before it was due. I finished it up, and decided to take a break. I saved the file and turned off my computer. About an hour later I came back to my computer to render the animation, and when I tried to load up the file, I recieved a message stating that it was an Invalid 3ds file. Everything was gone, I checked the backup that was made during a hold operation, and recieved the same message. Unfortunately that was the only backup. My teacher was kind enough not to fail me in the class. Then just the other day, the same exact thing happened, only that the backup was not corrupted, and I was able to save the project. Do you know why this happened twice? Thank you very much. Chris Wynn
#188075From: David J. MarksAug 30, 1995 10:35 AM
>> Do you know why this happened twice? << Long 3DS sessions tend to eat up available swap space — especially on large projects. It is very possible that the hard drive was too full to hold your project-save. If you selected the same name as an existing project, it would attempt to create a BAK file, then try to overwrite the project file. A failure would not only trash your current save, but also the previous PRJ file, since it had the same name. Also, be careful not to power down your system while there is still data in your disk cache. Old versions of SMARTDRV were notorious for delayed disk writes. I use the "+" button to do incremental saves every 20-30 minutes (MYJOB01.PRJ, MYJOB02.PRJ, etc.) In this case, if anything messes up, I have several versions to refer back to. – Dave