Was making some Bantam grass and imported it into Bryce (I haven't used Bryce much been packing up the house mostly), and decided to pick another sky, other than blue to see how it looked and, whoooaa, no skies! just little black rectangles where my skies used to be...opening previous done images their skies were intact, but new images no skies (I also checked materials, objects etc, they were ok)...
So anybody have any ideas, some were custom skies I made, others were presets...obviously I reloaded Bryce, but the disappearing sky thingy has me worried....

sorry...they are gone. I lost over 50 of my best self-made models this way....

It happened to me too, all you can do for future reference is save everything you make in the presets. I really sympathize with your loss I know how it feels after all the hard work you put into them. Catlin

Now I'm worried. What is this? Any chance to avoid this happening? Backin' up the libraries into another directory just in case? I have not so much diskspace, but if this is frequent, I will surely do it. Anguished, Stefano

It's a nasty thing bryce sometimes suddenly throws at you. If the sky's exsist in your old scenefiles you can try and save those in a new file. Would you like a copy of my sky-presets? I don't have to many sky's saved, but it's better than no sky's at all.

Always keep a backup of your libraries. You never know when they get screwed up. It can also happen to the model-libraries and the texture libraries. It's mostly happens when bryce crashes while saving a new preset into a libraryfile.

Thanks Rayraz, I thought it was just me... most of the custom skies I saved to cd, and alot of the other presets I got here in freestuff and the market place are burned to cd also, it's just a pain to know I have to look thru all that stuff to find my favorites again, I already created a log file to save the ones I really like, when I find them, and I have my written scene info in my daily work journal to go through to help with the re-stocking, the log file will really make it easier to replace lost stuff, just import the entire file, voila, instant replacement...backup, backup, backup

Backup your preset libraries. THIS WILL HAPPEN TO YOU. IT IS JUST A MATTER OF TIME. Do not say it hasn't happened to me. It is just a matter of time. Backup! Backup!!!! BACKUP!!!

Busy burning todays 11th CD... Backupping takes many cd's. But it's worth the effort.

Save up for a DVD burner less disks,Or better yet save and get another Harddrive about 120gig should work...I unfortunately only use a 20 gig as backup....Need more money...Now accepting donations...

You can never do to much backup! I rather waist 10+ cds than loose models, mats, etc! This was the first time ive heard of this error though... Another one for the long list!

The price of one of those cheap LG CDR burners will save you much heartache. Keeping it on another hd is useful too but even those can die, both disk and cdr best option.

Its also a good thing, having files on a couple of cds. Especially if you use noname cds! The silvery surface can be messed up and come loose after some time.

Yeah, already do that Rochr.... though I've never heard of things just going away like this before. Oh well, thanks for the heads up.

Online back ups. Only way to go. Automatic every morning at 4am.

I've already got 120Gig diskspace. I've also been saving for a DVD-burner, but there's only one dvd+r/dvd-r combo on the market as far as I know and that one has problems reading disks. I'm waiting for the Pioneer dvd+r/dvd-r combo that should be under developement (but I heard that rumour 4 months ago and it still isn't here). I've now saved enough money to buy 3 DVD-burners, but there's still no good dvd+r/dvd-r combo drive.

get the new imac 17" for 1800 dollars, and that comes with a 4x dvd burner! TADA! :)

But that's probably not a combo-burner. Plus it's $600 above my budget.

These presets that get lost, are you just talking about ones you made or downloaded, or do even the original items get lost and have to be reloaded from the Bryce CD? Lin

good ta know. I hate to see your skies go. I could look up my web sites for skies, but if you made them yourself, then there's not much to do. Haven't tried the Bantam grass yet, but I'm a little concerned if it pulls things like that.
Man, I've checked out blank DVD's, and at B-Buy, they were like $20 a box. Rayraz has got me beat, it takes days for me to get enough stuff to get a CD together. Since I started at 'rosity, I'm only up to #48..it's just so much cheaper to do them that way.

There is a good chance that you may have had another program battling Bryce over the use of your graphics card. Another good chance that you did not loose your presets until you reloaded. A hard reboot after a 3 minute shutdown may have brought the presets back. Think back and see if you added any new software that may demand high use of the graphics card. If so, make sure it isn't running when you use bryce or poser. Sometimes Poser will do this to Bryce if it is running at the same time. More memory and allocated hard disk space to the graphics card may help also. I had a similar problem, but did not loose any presets. I found out that my graphics card tv-tuner software and hardware were demanding to much from the system. Even though the tv-tuner was off. Once I completely shut it off, everything came back to normal. I hope this helps someone. Check other programs before reloading and make sure to do a hard reboot, not just a restart.

I had the very same problem twice now. I was trying to save some stuff that I made when it lost everything. I am glad to read about how to avoid and prepare.

Lin, they were all the Bryce presets (ones that come with Bryce) and the few I added to my presets...the night before they were there, next day only little black rectangles where my skies used to be...the really strange thing is they were in the preset folder when I looked but refused to show up in Bryce, my guess is Bryce lost some brain cells and forgot where they were...:]

Z Shadow, I shut everything down when I use Bryce because it is so tempermental, nothing was using the card but Bryce, reboot didn't help, so I just reinstalled Bryce... This type of thing is not unusual, just read back over the forum posts, Bryce just gets uppity now and again...:)

Zhann, Like I said, some graphics cards use your hard drive space to help bryce along. If you have done a lot of work in bryce and reboot, and still don't get your presets back, chances are that you need to do a defrag to your hard drive. Even a re-install, unless you un-install the previous bryce will use the same presets that are allready on the system. You said it yourself to Lin that the presets were in the folder, but bryce wasn't finding them. There are plenty of ways of fixing the problem without a re-install unless you are using a mac.

Mac users don't take offense. It was early in the am when I wrote the previous post and what I meant to say is that I don't know enough about mac's to give an educated answer to the problem at hand. I'm sure there are ways of correcting it on a mac.

Z Shadow, nope, using a PC, defrag wasn't necessary, using only 25% of my HD (180GB) and as regular maintenance a defrag is done every month, but like I said I burn everything to cd, so it was just a question of reloading, I asked because I had seen other posts of presets and objects disappearing from Bryce for no reason, and I thought someone might have an insight as to why this happens...guess we're all in the dark on that one...however, I have my suspicions about XP and Bryce...:]

Funny you should mention XP Zhann 'cos I never had this happen when using WIN 98 but it's happened a couple of times since switching to XP. Strange goings on, perhaps we need an XP expert to sort this out. Catlin