#3D Studio
2 messages in this thread
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
>> 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