I'm not writing to ask for a solution, just to vent a bit. So, I'm in P5 having a truly wonderful time with the new Forest Ruin by Transpond from RDNA. I'll admit, I think I was over-taxing my system a bit with the amount of stuff I put in the image, but things seemed to be going OK. And I was almost done. 3 people figures--yes, 1 was V3--8 clothing figures, 2 hair figures, the forest ruin complete and two trees-type figures. And the textures I used were probably pretty large for the people. Anyway, I was starting to play with the lights, being mindful that I probably couldn't do anything terribly fancy. I clicked on light2 and Poser disappeared. Just like that. Yes, I panicked. I checked my resources to make sure I just couldn't see it, but it was gone. For safety, I re-booted, restarted Poser, and re-opened. It wouldn't open. Tried again. Nothing. I opened the file in EditPad and the file had been truncated after the material setting for Light2. At least half, if not more, of the file is just gone. sigh I think this time I'm going to create it in pieces and export to Carrera, Bryce or Vue. They can probably handle it better. BUt, darn it, I wanted to use the Skin node in the material room. don't know if there's a moral to this other than save backups. Or have two versions of your file and switch between saving them. It's never happened to me before. I've been dealing with the quirks of P5 and have actually been very happy. This is just disappointing. Anyway, I wanted to share to warn others, not to bash P5. Yes, it has problems, but so did P4.

Sorry JetM, I know what you mean - I have had that happen to me in P4 :( Very frustrating! Hope the rest of your day goes better! ladynimue

I know you weren't looking for a solution, but I hope you can indulge me anyhoo, just in case this may help... There was once a 3d environment-modelling proggie called UnrealEd, for Unreal Tournament (and U2, and UT2k3, etc etc). Before that, there was a proggie called Qoole (Quake Object Oriented Level Editor) and BSP I'm sure others here can think up similar proggies, all of which are/were about as stable as a bowl of jello on the San Andreas Fault in 1906. I learned hard and fast that you always always always save successive builds. I'd give the file a short name, and then save it as a series with each successive build, like this: crap001a.unr crap001b.unr ... crap007a.unr (note: Rhino can do this automatically for you, too.) the point wasn't that there was a failed undo feature, or that there was no recourse to recover bad files, but the reason I did it was two-fold: 1) Sometimes you go to compile (think "render") and the thing would fail completely, though you'd be damned if you could discover why. After an hour of not finding the problem, it was easier to go back to the last known good file, and rebuild the difference, going slower this time and taking it step by step until you either found the problem, or for some reason did not experience it this go 'round. Poser has a habit of this sometimes, where a render goes horribly wrong, but you don't know exactly why... so you take a step back and pay attention while making up the difference. 2) Sometimes while compiling your proggie just dies. It locks up, power to the computer goes out, the OS chokes solid (Windows), whatever... but in either case when you restore the machine/program, the file is now hopelessly corrupt and can't even be opened. This is a great time to delete the bad file and go back to the last known good save :) Nothing sucks worse than a file gone haywire. The good news is, perhaps you can rescue the file in time (it is ASCII-based, and perhaps just needs a bit of editing to fix) The bad news is that the file is prolly bigger than Hell, and would take some real expertise to recover. Hope you can make good on the image, and let us know what it looks like when you're done, eh?

You may actually be able to get the poses/characters out of the PZ3 - it's fiddly but I have, by trial and error, pulled out a usable file from a PZ3 (in my case not corrupt, but referring to a figure I didn't have). Try opening a CR2 for a character saved with props and clothing in a text editor, as a template, and the same for your PZ3 and try moving corresponding sections from the latter into the former. Or you could just redo it in sections and export to another application....

One trick I always use, with programming as well as graphics: in every currently used folder I make a "ZIPIT.BAT". This zips all relevant files, and copies the ZIP into an entirely separate place as well. Several times a day I hit the ZIPIT. Keeps me safe from squinchy programs, and als protects me from two levels of my own stupidity. When I decide this PZ3 is obsolete and delete it, the ZIPped version is still there. When I get even stupider and delete the ZIP in the current folder, the copy elsewhere is still present. (Of course, I can and do implement a third level of Murphy's Law, but that's fairly rare.)

Thenks for the support. It's much appreciated. I took a look at the file again in EditPad to see if I could salvage it, then decided that it wasn't worth it. I've started from scratch and I'm relatively happy with the results. Wouldn't you know it, I tried exporting OBJs to render in Carrera this time and that program doesn't seem to like the OBJ of the ruins environment. I give up! (for today) Now I just need to do the lights... It wouldn't be worth it if it wasn't hard, right? I seem to recall hearing that occasionally...

I do think that for large scenes it is much more efficient, as well as being safer, to export it from Poser in pieces and assemble it elsewhere. There's no point in pushing Poser further than it will easily go.