I've just spent more than 2 days modeling and rendering a piece in Bryce and when I try to close the file... I get a generic failure message! Eeek. And my Bryce DOCS folder is full of these AxiFFF.tmp files (which store the information temporarily)... anthing I can do to save the BR5 file? Or... how can I access the AxiFFF files? I did manage to save some extra Bitmaps and export a JPEG. Thanks for feedback and suggestions, Susan

The axiFFF are temporary files that bryce makes during its save operations. Rename the axiFFF to a .br5 file, then try and open them - hopefully the scene you lost is in one of them. This may work, or it may not.....

Message edited on: 07/24/2004 06:57

Thank you Flak... How do I rename a file? Do I right click on the name and type in .br5? Is that what you mean? -Susan

That would do it! axifff.br5 Rightclick/rename/.....works for me..

Hang On!
You try to save but can't? Is bryce still open?
Minimize it and check how much room you have left on your hard disk. To do this click on my computer and right click on the C drive. A little menu should pop up and you should select "properties". A window with a little pie chart will open showing used space in blue and free in pink. If you are trying to save a 300mb file into 100mb you will get this generic error.

If you don't have enough room to save try deleting files. Did you download some big trailers like the latest for king arthur at 51 mb? If you have files like this that you can delete and get back later you may want to get rid of them to save your bryce file. If you have a CD burner you can put them on a disk. You should also cd archive any old bryce scenes from last year that are still lurking on your hard drive.

I don't know how big your file is but if you have over 500mb free and still can't save it the problem might be in the file itself. One extreme fix is to go up to the top and make the windows bar appear. go into the edit menu and click on select all. While everything's selected go to ed and select Copy. Go into the file menu and create a new bryce scene without quitting bryce. When the new file opens press paste. This will paste all the objects and lights from the old scene into the new one. You will probably have to reset the camera and the sky settings. Try to save this file and see if it is sucessful.

Message edited on: 07/24/2004 14:24

AxiFFF.tmp files are created when bryce is closed without saving properly. Sometimes you can rename them AxiFFF.BR5 and they will open but usually they get about half open and crash on you. If you just turn off the computer you create one of these every time. They can rapidly use up all your drive space. If you have these, rename them to .BR5. Try to open them by clicking on the file and letting it open. If bryce fails to open it delete it. You need to be fair hacker to repair this kind of damaged file. The other advice I have is get a big hard drive and save your work after major changes and every day. My stargate9 mesh is called that because I have 9 backup versions saved starting with plain stargate on day one and ending with stargate9 on the ninth day of modeling. I did screw up on stargate7. I opened stargate4 to get the parts I needed before I messed them up and pasted them into stargate8. Because I had the early backup I was able to do only one more day of work rather than redo five days. Save early, save often, and save multiple versions. It will keep you from getting stuck out on a limb after major investments in time and effort.

Thanks so much Electroglyph and also for the RR challenge mats. I used one of yours in one of my recent scenes and gave you credit... I think it was "SUPERALGEBRAS". What do you consider a big hard drive? -Susan

I didn't want to step on what Flak said because he's absolutely right. But, if you close bryce to try to deal with the temp files and you can't open any of them you may never be able to resurrect the original file. If you get enough space free to save the file and it goes great. If you can copy everything and paste it into a new bryce scene you usually loose the thing that was messing up the file in the first place and then you know not to use it again or do it differently. If bryce has already been turned off your only alternitave is to look in the temp files and see if you can reopen them. A big hard drive is whatever you can afford. Generally you have older smaller drives disappear and bigger ones that are more expensive come in. The newest ones will be real pricey and sometimes have reliability issues. You will have a price range where you double in size and the price doubles. Eventually you reach a size where double the size costs more than double the price. I like to buy just under where this cost starts to curve up. Right now it seems to be 160GB. I have a year of serious work on mine plus junk and still have over 100GB free. Thanks for the mention. It's great when it happens. Unfortunately I'm in the surf galleries OR work and eat mode for the moment so I missed it when it came out.

Picked up 2 x 160gb hdds a while back for just over 100 each...bargain round these parts....pretty damn good investment too even though I did have a hard time getting them to work properly.

Thanks Electroglyph and TheBryster for the hard-drive info. I did lose quite a few things in the file... but a lot was saved. I did lose a computer I spent a long time modeling and placing just right. I was going to make a Bryce obp file from it... but oh well... that's the breaks. At least I got the piece rendered and out... -Susan

All I have to add is that I've never had to rename those temp files, merely opened them directly into Bryce, and that this has only worked on a large scene one time for me. All of the other times, it failed. It's kind of a last resort thing...

electroglyph said > I didn't want to step on what Flak said

Heck, feel free to step on anything I say whenever you want to - the more info we have on all these bryce things the merrier :)

electroglyph said > AxiFFF.tmp files are created when bryce is closed without saving properly.

I've only noticed these files happening when I try and save a br5 file over the top of an existing br5 file (as opposed to when saving to an entirely new file, in which case I haven't seen any axifff files). Haven't seen any axifff files at any other time though.

I think the bryce overwriting process goes as... firstly, bryce creates an axifff which contains the br5 of your new scene file that you want to save, then it creates a second axifff which is a copy of the file about to be overwritten, then it copies the first axifff to overwrite the existing file. At the end of all that writing, thats when bryce (or its meant to) deletes the axifff's. So when bryce crashes during the save, you're left with some or all of the axiFFF things, depending on where in the save process it crashes. Or at least thats what I think I can see happening on my HDD. Yeah, I watched the axiFFF files in the directory be created (and the sizes they had lol) when I overwrite an old br5 file lol - worse than watching the render line ;).

The cut and paste thing electroglyph mentions is a new one on me - will definitely have to give it a go next time something untoward happens :)

Message edited on: 07/25/2004 05:50

Aye, you can really see it happen when saving over an existing file. On XP, anyway, it will go through it's saving process, then write the image file, then Bryce will just sit there for a minute or more depending on the file size. Based off of what Flak said I think that (since Bryce isn't XP-compliant, really) that it's just having a rough time dealing with the temp files... (deleting them, or whatever.) So if you're not sure that your machine can really handle a scene, when saving it it's best to save it under a NEW filename, then just delete your old one later or whatever. Cuts down on the chances of it crashing during a save...