I'm sort of an old newbie having started as Ray Dream 5 was leaving the scene. I'm going through the "unknown error when saving render" problem again. For a while with C3 I thought it was gone for good. I don't have potent equipment -- a laptop with a 700 mega hz P IV with 320 megs of ram and a 500 mega hz PIII with 380 megs of ram. Problem is on both machines with most files. Occasionally I'll get a save, but it takes days to get lucky. I've tried shutting down and restarting, reloading the software, and reloading the operating systems -- Me on the laptop and 98 on the desktop. What else can I try? Thanks for your insights. Paul

If you are using global illumination then you could try turning off the interpolation, I had the same problem and renders crashing out after two days of chugging away, have had no rpoblems since. It will add to render time of course!! Regards rokol.

You might try using the batch render function (even if you are only rendering one file). C3 should save automatically throughout the render and will pick up if the rendering isn't completed. Mark

I have found that once a file is corrupted it is difficult to get rid of the problem. I always make a "backup trail" by saving as "workfile1, workfile2" etc everytime I make a change to the file I don't want to have to redo. When I get a flaky file (any glitch that seems unusual ie a shader disappears etc)I back up in the trail to a "clean" file and start over. I have found that getting rid of unused master objects and shaders (Edit menu), giving objects and shaders real names, checking for inconsistancies in the object heirarchy, and in general keeping things organized seems to have an effect on file stability. Sometimes disabling Agrooves and grows for the file save helps. Sometimes I have been able to recover files by copying and pasting objects or shaders individually into new files. It all adds to the thrill of that final render! ;-) Ed

I had a problem like that once.. I have found for some reason if you take the file and just move it to a new drive.. it seems to go away.. not sure way.. just does... though I'm on a mac not a pc... getting rid of unused masters is also a great idea.. I do it a lot.

Thank you all. Batch rendering is working great. It took a little exploration before I realized that what is rendered is the saved file and not the display in the assembly room. I had tried copying objects to a new file earlier as Ed suggests, but it only worked once. Then it, too, was corrupted. I do have a complex layers list shader with twelve shader domains on the principal object. Could this be the source of the problem? It is thrilling, Ed, after you get a working strategy and the lump in your throat and the knot in your belly go away. Again, thank you and thanks to the Carrara community from whom I have learned so much over the last three years. Paul

The copying objects to new files works best if you do them one at a time testing at each step to find the offending object/shader. It certainly seems that he deeper shader hierarchy the slower things go and the more prone to glitches the file will be. It is interesting that the more one works with a program the fewer bugs it seems to contain. I think its a result of the software training the user. ;-) Glad you got it worked out.