Hello. I have animated an object and saved. How can i delete a saved animation and start a new one with the same object? And another question - i have a problem copying objects from one file to another - is this a bug?

It would be helpful if you would include the version of Carrara you're using. I'm going to assume you have Carrara 2...everything but the bones (which is new with version 2) should also work in Carrara 1.x... here's what I do, first I do a save as. This way I have the original, in case i really screw-up. So if my orginal file is "Batman.car" the saved as version would be "Batman a.car" By deleting animation, I think deleting keyframes would work. On the time line, they are the little upwards pointing black triangles. Click on one and it should become "hollow", i.e. filled with white with the Carrara yellow selection color around it. At the top of the timeline is a series of buttons, click on the one with the little trash can icon. That'll delete the keframe. Shift-clicking allows you to select more than one keyframe and you can also hit your delete key to eliminate keyframes. Another way to get rid of keyframes on objects is to select an object and in the properties tray, select "Still" on the Animation Parameter area. You'll be given a dialog box, if there's a slider, set it to zero, if there isn't, it'll saysomething about all the animation being deleted, click okay. If you're working with bones, the delete all keyframes manually and then select the skeleton and in the skinning menu choose send bones to reference position. That should get you back to a starting point where you can create a new animation. As far as copy-pasting objects, Have no problems with that. But I have gig of RAM, so it could depend on how large/intricate the objects you're copying are. First I would save my file and then select the object and then choose copy from the edit menu and then go over to the file and make that the active window and choose paste from the edit menu. You could also close the file you copied from, and then open the file you're be pasting into. hth

thanks, the problem is - when i delete the little black triangles, some parts of the animated object disappear. Is there any way to avoid that? And - as for copy-paste, i did exactly that, and the only thing i see is hot points. Is that somehow connected with the amount of RAM?

do you have any modifiers on the objects? That could account for the "missing objects." Also, go back to frame one, and see if the objects are still there. Are the objects still listed in the list(left side of the time line). If so, then I wouldn't worry. Especially if I did a save as, so I would have the original file. If you could post a screen capture of a view of the scene and the timeline before and after that could give some clues (as my natural state is cluelessness ;> ). I would just make sure that the triangle is "selected" and use only the trashcan icon on the time line to delete the keyframes (I was mistaken, hitting the delete key will delete the object. Sorry about that, I claim not-enough-coffee as my excuse). hth

Oh, about the copy-paste, what do you have the object preveiw set to? Make sure it's either gourand or flat. Screen capture of that would help too.

It's usually a good idea to put an object up into the browser tray and then pull it back down into a new file. The browser is smarter about keeping things intact. Don't be disillusioned though because it doesn't track EVERYTHING. It does a good job though. -Kix

Thanks again -Kix and MrMongo! your advice helped... and another question :) When i apply the spin function in the behaviors section to the object - it spins too fast. I've tried changing the "cycles per second" but it didn't work. What am i doing wrong?

snorkz, Spin control is a bear any way that you look at it. The controls are set up so that the object will spin X times per second. If you are rendering say a propeller, you will need to have a very high value to show the speed of the propeller. Try not to make X the number of Frames Per Second (FPS) of you animation as you might as well not have the spin modifier. If you are trying to get the speed of a planet in space, well, that's a very low value, and I don't mean negative. I'm creating a planet animation and I've found that integer values just don't cut it!! But manual entry of decimal values work REAL well. .5 being 1 rotation every 2 seconds, .25 being 4 rotations per second, and so forth. I've found that .1 or .05 work well for my situation as this slow the rotations to a virtual crawl and makes it seem realistic. Hope this helps! Ken