at some point, i'll be able to laugh about this, and the rest of you can go right on ahead and have yourselves a good one.

but right now, i'm so mad i've gone beyond seeing red and have hit colors heretofore unknown to mankind.

I ventured into animations in vue (thanks, peggy!).  I had a lovely 22 second one rendering (again, thanks, Peggy - i know its a lot more than what i was SUPPOSED to do LOL)... i was terribly facinated by the entire process and wanted something cool to be able to show for what i've been learning.  And the projected render time was ok... it  kept telling me under 19 hours for the first half, and under 10 for second half.  Total time involved so far... approx 20 hours rendering. (dont you love how vue lies?)  600+ frames.  each frame took under 15 seconds to actually render - the most time was spent in processing.

Ohhh i was pleased as punch about an hour ago... progress had reched 64%, and it was going sooooooo well.

And i saw my cat under my desk.

next to my backup power supply.

with her paw hovering over the button to turn it off.

and as she is staring at me, her eyes golden... and i swear, they had red glowing flecks and horns sprouted out of her little head.... and she grinned.  then pressed down - and turned my whole system off.

and there... went... everything.

that was when i saw colors i've never seen before in my life.

and my cat, wisely, is still hiding under the bed.  i told her i dont want to see her until morning.  (litter box runs & food/water runs are alllowed).

so... go ahead and laugh... hubby has already solved the problem and midnight-kitty will not be able to get her paw near the button again.... i'll join ya in laughing ---- later.

thanks for letting me rant...

There's a cat with one less of her nine lives.... 

Get yourself a power backup.  They last about 30 seconds to 1 min of battery life (depending on computer and monitor usage) and give you plenty of time to save and turn off.

I am so sorry to hear about this.  I would be mad as a wet cat also.

that WAS the problem... it was my battery backup... my (p)ups as my dad calls it - gives me 5 minutes of backup power when my electricity dies here.  thing is, it has a button that resets/turns off - and my cat found it... this was the second time she's done it - in the 2 years i've had the (p)ups.

it was a case of ... "i WISH the power had gone out"

edited: oh yes - as i was rendering an animation... i couldnt save & resume render, so i was censored myself no matter what.

Oh well, we all feel with you. I had that twice in my Animation life. Once when I by accident shifted the monitor a big backwards and forgot that i put something on the table behind. That felt down and precisely onto the power strip. Yeah, all was off immediately. Very cool.

The second was even worse because it was in my first professional job for a film. I worked on that under quite some time pressure. On a Monday I came into the office and no computer was working. I asked the admin what happened and he told me that some cleaning women had the order to clean the fuse boxes of the building. They decided to switch the power off for the whole building first. And caused a crash of all the mainframe computers there. The crash was heavy, all disks in the computer I worked on died on that. It took fourteen days to recover most of the content (no personal backups at that time - before PCs existed). And I swear, it was not the nicest two weeks in my life.

That might be the reason many say, render the frames to pictures, and combine them afterwards to a "avi" or whatever. So you can continue to render if anything goes wrong.

Quote - That might be the reason many say, render the frames to pictures, and combine them afterwards to a "avi" or whatever. So you can continue to render if anything goes wrong.

Indeed.....stellar advice and also, if you do that in Vue[ I use this technique in Imagine3D] you can save to .psd which is beautifully lossless and totally tweakable before you assemble the final product...wish I could afford anything but the PLE...I'd be animating my head off.. ...

 Sorry to hear it. Aren't pets fun (though where would we be without them)?

A couple of years ago I was programming late into the night, and I accidently passed a null to a function called "revDeleteFolder". All of the sudden the comptuer's hard drive started cranking away and everything locked up. 

About 20 seconds later it occurred to me what I had done-- the program was systematically deleting each and every file on the hard disk.  I reached around the computer and pulled the plug. Too late. Damage done.

Thank heavens I live in the country. I'm sure the yelling could be heard quite a ways away.

Seems funny now-- not then!

PS. since then I've written my own functions for deleting folders and they won't delete system files no matter what. Live and learn :-)

Actually your it sounds as though your cat is very good at finding the heat source.  I know mine has found it several times!    But I feel better  it's the cat than the mouse that ate my mouse cord and earphones cord and power cord.  (aren't those things supposed to electrocute them?).

I'm able to... kinda... laugh at it today.

only because i just successfully rendered a 15 second animation of a ball falling down a flight of steps.  yay me!  (ignoring the fact that the ball sinks into the stair edges... rolls in unnatural lines, and too slow for comfort...)

i will have to learn this technique of "sewing" ... assembling the still images to do animations.... it sounds like if i go that route, i wont be going back to trying it this way =D

thank you to everyone who listened to the rant =D  midnight-kitty is still safe & sound, and is now allowed out with the humans again.  she may even eventually regain her "little person in fuzzy body with no thumbs" status.

Wabe:  OUCH!!!!  two excellent examples of things being sooooo much worse =D

Thank you, Chris and BobbyStahr - i'll be trying this =D  And Bobby... start with esprit, work your way up.  Its totally worth it in the long run, even if you have to tuck 10$ back here, 20$ back there to do it...  i cant use the PLE even though it has the functions i so desperately want to play with right now... those stupid watermarks make my eyeballs go crossed.

Chipp - yep, pets are indeed a LOT of fun.  Midnight-kitty has kept me in laughter... with only the occassional tear shed.  And i wont even pretend to understand half of what you said with the null & div & other programming stuff (i leave that stuff to people with brains - i seem to lack the required ingredients... brain cells)... but i understood "deleted files" - OUCH.  what a learning experience!!!

Osper:  yes... she is very good at finding heat sources... she's an Alaskan kitty LOL.  actually, in this case, it wasnt heat source... she had her paw right on that button - KNOWING what it does.  yeah, shes a bit too smart at some things (i have to password protect my screen saver now, and set it for 5 minutes before i go to bed.... because she will open up web browsers, and other things and mess with them if i dont... as it is, i tend to wake up with evidence that she was "trying to bypass" my password LOL.  i usually laugh and tell her "hahaha, mommy kept you from the kitty porn AGAIN!"

hmmm... no wonder she pushed my button.

and yep - power cords SHOULD electrify the mice... but i think some of them just like playing with electricity LOL.  some mouse had a lucky day =D

and wouldnt that be cannibalism... the mouse ate the mouse (cord)?

Anyways...  once again, thanks everyone =D

So you did have a power backup and the cat turned that off.  Well, I would call this a cat-astrophe.

ask the cat... it was her censored that nearly became MY trophy....

cat-***-trophy ;)

inserts render of a cat becoming the first orbital moggie, foot propelled, that is! ;)

ouch, yeha that'll suck, as folk say, always render to seperate image files in lossless format! learned that lesson ages ago in Bryce :)

chuckles  i consider it a lesson learned for me, now =D

now to learn how to put it all together like that LOL.

Just don't for one second think that was an accident.
Cats don't work that way.

We don't have cats in the house, or dogs. Once we had both, and the dog tipped a speaker over on my laptop that was on the floor (was working while on my stomach). HD was okay so we just transferred everything.

But then, there was the time I was 5000 words into a story, and I got worried that I didn't have backup. 5000 was a lot for me back then. Even now it would be a loss of about 15-30 hours.

So my husband installed a CD burner in my computer for me. During that process, we had to unplug the harddrive. It was only a year old, but it fried. All gone. Everything I'd ever written that I hadn't printed out.

At the time I told him that I would rather break both my arms than lose all of that. 

On the Anmation Render time it could be much worse. According to Pixar they render 24 frames a second (Movie Industry Standard) . The average frame takes 6 hours to render with some being as long as 90 hours, YIIIKKKSSS!!! Also, Dreamworks rendered "Shrek 3" in 20,000,000 render hours and "Bee Movie" in 23,000,000 render hours. On a single core comp that would be 2281 and 2623 years for a movie.  **8^O
**15 seconds a frame isn't to bad now is it??? *;^D
Sorry bout the Cat-astrophe

***Source:
LINK See page 13
Source for Shrek 3 and Bee Movie Info found on the DVDs

ok.  so im a moron.

i had a lovely response written.

didnt hit "post reply" and without thinking, clicked on link above.  oops.

ok... so now... yep, mine wasn't as bad as it coulda been... had no idea how many render hours it took them, but i can definately see why... specially looking at tinkerbell & wall*e, the industry's newest "darlings".

my jaw STILL hits the floor - i think i spent the entire time watching wall*e with my mouth hanging wide open in amazement at the animation.

am doing a different animation this time... 20 frames per seconds, 4 seconds long, rendering to sequential jpg.  (thanks for all the suggestions there, folks!)  and its strange how the world works at times, because right as this was going on, someone new popped into my life via an email response to one of my freebies... and good suggestions came about from him regarding animations & saving to jpgs, etc - even though he only uses Poser as far as i can determine (i will convert him....), the information is valid no matter what.

at some point, when this becomes more than a seriousely addicting hobby (the animation part anyway... i DO have an ultimate goal in mind with it - a series of 15 to 30 minute animations depicting some of the Native Alaskan legends, tales, lore, myths, etc.... but this is in the future, and will involve me figuring out that "ranch" business - aint no way my home-based computer will be able to handle all that, and no way will i wait 2,281 years for my animation to finish rendering.  LOL.

ok, now to hit "post reply" BEFORE touching that link.

DId you watch the new video over at GeekatPlay?  They show Animate for DAZ Studio and how to import an animation through Collada.  Wow - just bought Animate.  Very fun! 

Quote - no way will i wait 2,281 years for my animation to finish rendering.  LOL.

Well I don't know about Pixar, but Dreamworks has 2500 DualCore HPs, 5000 cores total and at that rate it's a little over 6 months of non-stop rendering. Although I am sure dew to editing and cutting scenes the time is a bit shorter, maybe say a couple hundred years, give or take, LOL!!!!!! Also if you haven't Watched Shrek on DVD it worth the rent just to catch the Special Extras after the Movie to see some of the bloppers that 3D will through at you, It's Absolutely Wild what can happen.

Oh and  for the record my Avatar took roughly 40 minutes plus per frame, but I could have cut that time to mere seconds if I had rendered it at say 320x240. I rendered it at 1024x768.

Hey, All the Best with your Ani about Alaskan Natives, really sounds great and I hope it turns out well!!!!!

i havent ever really messed with daz studio - i think the last time i touched it, it had just come out. (long LONG ago LOL)

i really should try it again... that AniMate thing intrigued me.  but you have to go through... collada?  so... another program to aquire & figure out? 

mmm, think i'll stick with poser to vue for now, but am definately curious as to how well that works, and if Vue is happier with it that way...

wow... cross post =D

i WAS wondering about your avatar, thelby....   and yep, i love to watch the 3D bloopers... cracks me up =D 

i think my ani is going about an hour per frame, give or take about 15 minutes either way... im not sure... and thanks for the best wishes on my animation dream... i'll get there some day - i may be 75 years old, but it'll happen =D