Any ideas of what happened here??!! :( I had finally finished my scene and set it to render at a larger resolution. Took a nap and when i woke up a few hours later, it hadn't rendered. It was stuck, so I had to close it out. Okay, no problem. I'd saved it (top image) and would just try again. But when I opened the file, looks what's happened! (bottom image) The spear has dropped down to the floor, the building has vanished and so have the lights! It also looks like the female character's hair has vanished as well. What the heck?? I've not done anything different than what I normally do, and this has never happened before. :(

I just tried to open the previously saved file and it's exactly the same. In fact, I've tried every single #$@!$%# one of them and they're ALL the same. :(

Okay, added some some simple lights to get a better idea of how bad the damage is. Her clothes have popped off, her textures are all screwed up, and the building somehow resized down really tiny. And when I render it, look what happens! I've never seen anything like this before.

Check your render frames. Render to a single frame vs all frames. Eh... maybe.

When P6 blows its top, it often does this. Specifically, all the items in the scene have been 'Restored' to the last Memorized state, which usually piles everything in the middle of the scene in zero position. Same action as hitting Ctrl-A. Unless you've saved an earlier version of the PZ3, there's no solution except to re-build the scene.

PsychoNaut, I'm not sure what you mean by that. Could you explain pelase? :) Thanks ockham. So this is just some kind of bizarre glitch that doesn't really have a specific cause? sigh Figures. I've been using P6 for months now and never had a problem. Just my luck that something I spend all day working on is the one to get messed up. I could just cry. :(

Had a similar thing happen except in my case the scene reverted to wireframe which I rarely use and all the lights had just gone, they weren't even in the scene! Lost everything! It "SEEMS" to happen if you do a save after a failed render, that's my experience anyway so if I get a failed render now I just close the whole thing down and don't save when it asks. I haven't had this issue since doing that! Definite P6 glitch IMHO! thefixer, poser coord.

A few questions, Are "Enable binary morph targets" on? (EDIT>Set prefs>) Are you using SR1 or SR2? I'm sorry for you. It was a beauty but it's gone. No salvage. And this one even lost its wireframe which is the worst of all ( colors).

I've had this happen when saving a scene with some disconected nodes in the materialroom.

I had something similar happening to me recently. My latest saved version of the scene opened with objects missing and/or it refused to render (stopped at "Loading textures"). The solution seems odd, but this is what I did: Restart Poser, open an earlier version of the scene that I had saved, with a couple of objects less. Then I did a couple of area renders in different places. After that it was time to open the newest scene version, without closing Poser first. And now it worked! I think I did a couple of area renders here too, before rendering the whole scene. Poser 6 SR2, Windows XP Home.

This it what it looks like when the scene file is corrupt (not completely written).

Poser gets tired after being asked to manage and remember lots of variables. When it gets fatigued from having to juggle stuff, like us, it makes mistakes and forgets things. My Guess is it didn't render because it was at the end of a high resource session. When this happens, you must restart Poser. If you save the file, you will ruin your scene file by simply saving all the mistakes. If you are making Poser juggle tons of resources, save and restart poser every few hours. Let it take a quicki break, rest it's eyes and start fresh, even if it is only for 10 seconds.

I think P6 doesn't handle some P4 mat poses correctly, it seems to leave stray nodes that if not deleated (or removed) cause this on save.

All I know is once I disabled .pmd's it has never once happened again. That was in SR1. Of course, each pc has its own personality...mine has a few dents in it. ;l

I second Anton's opinion. Poser does not appear to be programmed to respect the absolute 2GB address limit imposed by Windows. So when it hits it, all bets are off. The failure mode will be unpredictable, but potentially spectacular. The longer and/or harder you push Poser, the more often you need to save and restart. Sadly, each version of Poser gets worse in this respect, as more code with the same gawd-awful memory management (a ka none) means less room for WIP.

Thanks very much everyone. Very helpful info and tips which I will definitely keep in mind. :) ((Are "Enable binary morph targets" on? (EDIT>Set prefs>))) Errr ... no clue. I'll have to check on that. ((Are you using SR1 or SR2?)) I've got SR1. I've seen so many bad posts about SR2 that I decided not to install it, especially since everything was working just fine for me. Until now... What's the latest word on SR2? To install or not to install ... that is the question. LOL! :D

"I've seen so many bad posts about SR2 that I decided not to install it"<< Don't buy into to hype. Just install sr2. It is the current release and you should isntall it.

I can't stress enough how important it is to save before and after any changes are made to a scene. I wish Poser had the ability to undo more than the last task. That's why I started saving between additions, but it's saved me many timees when Poser has done something weird and I was able to pick up where I left off thanks to a prior saved .pzz file.

This has happened to me enough times with various versions of Poser that I have learned to always save before rendering. If the render crashses (gets stuck) then things often get really scrambled. If you have another saved version (I also tend to save more than one copy of each project in case I decide to go back to an earlier pose, light setting, etc.), then your best bet is to close Poser to unscramble it's "brain", then restart it and open your document again. This seems to happen to me most oftyen when either I'm using a lot of different textures or have tried a lot of textures (so they are still in Poser memory).

This is just a shot in the dark, so forgive me if I'm totally off base, but... Is it possible some of the posing and arranging of objects (walls, floors, etc.) were done in frame 30 and that upon reopening the drawing you were in frame 1? I had that happen once. I'd been doing hair/cloth simulations, and then I did some more edits to the scene, adding some walls (boxes) and scaling them and placing them. Save file, exit, come back the next day, and all of my extra items are gone. Well, they were there in frame 1, just not where I could see them. I advanced to frame 30, and everything was fine.

Saving does not help you in this instance. This particular corruption will trash each related file ass back to the 1st. Each time you open a previous save you find the same mess. I went back many saves. I save a lot. In my case, I must have deleted a .pmd while housecleaning. Think about it. Geometries on P6 Runtime, Characters on another. Pz3's saved to another drive....things get complicated. If your Runtime is not linked properly,,,(get file searches)? Doom This happened to me during SR1. They said it was fixed in SR2. I do not know. I no longer use binaries and live with a little hd bloat. Better than the alternative. .pmd's are a great thing. Great for merchants and great for loadtime of your scene. Fast as spit. Almost half the filesize. They are easy to lose in a batch delete. And if you have developed a few a characters or scenes from that deleted/lost original? All trashed (before). Nodes connected or not. Big scenes or a single figure in a blank window after a reboot. No diff. (msg24 7 and I are in deja vu). At least, that was my perseption of my problems. I unchecked "binaries" and it all stopped. Again SR2 is supposed to fix this. Then again, there are people here who have never crashed! Make your own conclusions.

Poser 6 SR2 still crashes, but it isn't as bad as all of the prior versions and service releases since 5.0. The problem continues to be bad memory management, but at least 90% of the time P6 SR2 gives you a warning that it's about to trash your work with the "Poser has encountered a problem while rendering" message. In my experience, you should never EVER save your scene after a render has crashed. Get out of poser double quick time and go back to your last saved version, otherwise you WILL lose your work. Also, avoid using the e-Frontier-recommended "Texture Filtering" setting in Firefly, especially if you are using hi-res textures. This checkbox should really be renamed "Cause the rendering engine to crash" As for the abomination known as External Binary Morph files, all I can say is that I turned that off in P6 a long long time ago, and I have never even bothered to check whether SR2 fixed it or not. After three experiences of ruined scenes and corrupted figures that had had their morph channels detached due to the unforgiveable bug in the original PMD handler, I will never trust that feature again. However, all of that said, on the whole Poser 6 SR2 works reasonably well and is acceptably reliable. It is, hoever, a VERY long way from something that you could regard as stable to use in a production environment. The only remedy that I know of is to save your scenes at least every ten minutes while working with ascending version numbers in the filename, then at least you can go back WHEN Poser trashes your work for you. (Note that - WHEN not IF)

((Is it possible some of the posing and arranging of objects (walls, floors, etc.) were done in frame 30 and that upon reopening the drawing you were in frame 1?)) Errr ... I don't know anything about Frames. I just open Poser, delete James, and then start adding stuff to my scene. Heh. :) ((I can't stress enough how important it is to save before and after any changes are made to a scene.)) Yep, I always do that. Learned that the hard way when I first started using Poser. LOL! ((Saving does not help you in this instance. This particular corruption will trash each related file ass back to the 1st. Each time you open a previous save you find the same mess.)) That's exactly what happened. I had 14 saved files for this image and every single one of them was messed up. Okay, guess I will install SR2 and keep my fingers crossed. :) Thanks again everyone, for the info and tips! Much appreciated! :D

"Okay, guess I will install SR2 and keep my fingers crossed. :)"<< You'll be fine. And then annoyed you were spooked off because things are fine. :) Lots under the hood on that one. One of the more impressive updates for sheer range of tweaks.

I had this problem frequently with SR1, and it was driving me crazy. I "think" it had to do with disconnected nodes. I un-checked the binary option, and still had the problem. But I have not had a single instance since installing SR2, and I have used SR2 a lot. My computer still crashes for other reasons (mine's got dents also, richardson!), but even these blue screens do not corrupt my .pz3s any more.

"I just open Poser, delete James, and then start adding stuff to my scene. Heh. :)"

Neyjour: Save yourself a little time...

Open Poser, delete James, go to "Edit->Preferences". Highlight "Set prefered state" then hit "Launch to prefered state".

Next time you start up Poser, James will have gone AWOL, and will only return under high-pressure commands from the character library:-))

Actually, setting prefered state is more powerful than that: it remembers a good percentage of your GUI setup. So you can change the size and position of the "working" window, the postions of most of the movable tool-groups and so on.

And if it ever screws up (or if you hit something or inadvertantly minimise something to such a point that you can't get it back), you can revert to the Factory state to get back the default values. Then, of course, you have to apply your preferences again, manually, but that's usually better than finding bits of Poser unable to be used:-)

Hope that helps startup, (if nothing else)...

Cheers,
Diolma
Edited 'cos some letters had dropped out of the message onto the floor, and I had to scrabble around, pick them up and insert them in the correct places.. Apologies if I missed any..

Message edited on: 01/22/2006 14:49

Ahh! Thanks diolma! I'll go do that now. :)