Has anyone had this oddity happen to him or her?  It has happened quite a few times to me. 

At seemingly random intervals, and while performing seemingly random tasks, Carrara's assembly room window suddenly goes upside down, and the program becomes totally unstable.

The only way to get it right is to exit out and reboot, then go back in and cross your fingers.  Oh yeh.  When you exit the program, Carrara locks up and you have to use task manager to shut it down.

I could write a book about all these weird bugs... LOL

No, never, and I have had Carrara since Version 3!

I am sure the problem is not Carrara.

Brian

It's weird..  This isn't the first file I have had this happen with.  It gets even weirder...  Ince it goes upside down, if I switch to a different camera, it goes right side up, But...  If I try to use the camera dolly, it switches back to the problem camera and goes upside down again.  But wait, theres more.  If I switch to another camera, and then move the dolly and see it go upside down, then if I try to do a spot render, it renders from the other camera...

I think you should not drink and drive camera's :)

Sounds like a Carrara/videocard problem though. I would think the translation between what happens under the hood to the screen gets scrambled. I have had a lot of visual handicaps regarding Carrara (and Hexagon) after my OpenGL settings were set back to default. That sorted a lot of things out for me.

My own Carrara suprise thing that seems to be unreplicatable. Every duplicate I make keeps using the same replace/scale factor I used at an early moment in the session. No matter what I do, it remains until I restart the program. Waiting for a couple of weeks to resurface.
I have had it since v3 I think. Once the developers tried to duplicate it on a similar system and all. But it did not succeed. I did not give it much thought, but a couple of weeks ago it was suddenly back again.

That' is weird and it has never happened to me and I have had Carrara since 5 Pro............................. earlier this year, tehehehe, Don't anyone get your tail feathers ruffled, I am just kiddin around, even though it is true. I really like Carrara and I have had very few problems with and 6 Pro seems very stable to me.

I am going to switch to the software renderer and see if that helps.  Wish me luck.

That did some neat tricks for me, after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.5 and rendering the vertex room virtually unusable because of extremely low refreshing... Hope it helps!

I'm on a PC so I am not sure if it would cause the same issues.

I guess not, but the implementation of OpenGL and it's interaction with graphic cards and drivers seems to be an issue that yields results like this on all configurations, I understood...

quarkness like the above is what makes working in Carrara "fun".  I made a spaceship and imported it into a scene.  Beautiful crash scene with bits and pieces scattered all over the landscape--Now if I could do it when I want to, it would be great.  Jan

It's pretty frustrating.  Whenever there is a contest I want to enter, I end up having to remove half of the elements that I wanted to include so Carrara won't bomb out with those infuriating Memory Allocation Errors.  It may be one of the lower cost 3D modeling packages, but it is still a pretty hefty chunk of change for the amount of frustration you have to put up with.  If there wasn't the great online help resources like Renderosity's forums, I would probably be in jail for shooting my computer by now.  Either that or bald from ripping my hair out.  I have no idea how folks manage to get their machines to do some of the more advanced renders I see here in the galleries.  I am on such a tight budget that I can't even afford shader ops and anything goos, so I have to try and do things like aging and dirt/rust in other creative ways...  And sometimes; Carrara just does not want to cooperate.

One of the tricks I do is render bits and pieces at a time and assemble them in PaintShop Pro-makes getting all the shadows aligned correctly etc very, very challenging.  Yeah sometimes Carrara can get very nasty and doesn't cooperate. eerrgh .  Jan 

Yeh, thats the big reason I don't like to do assembly in postwork.  Getting the lighting to look normal is a real pain.  The point is though, that when you pay as much as people do for a program for 3D modeling and rendering. you expect the software to be able to handle more than a very simple dumbed down scene.  My machine is no slouch.  I built it specifically for 3D modeling, It has a Phenom 9600 Quad Core CPU, 4GB of fast corsair RAM, An MSI motherboard, and a really good ATI 3450 video card.  It also has 3 really fast Seagate 1TB drives.  If this configuration can't handle a fairly complex scene, then there is something wrong with Carrara.

I used to have that problem alot on my other computer with C5; sometimes I get it on my notebook, but generally only when I go into the hair modeler.  I found that there are a combination of things that help.  When the screen locks, for me it's normally tied to processer usage.  I do a  Control Alt Delete and check which programs are up, then I shut down the ones not connected with system usage. That frees up some RAM to maneuver.  Another thing is to make sure all your windows are shut it the modeling rooms and texture room.  Those open windows sometimes make my videocard go freaky.

I used to get that problem maybe once a week with my old video card (Nvidia 7300GT) in my Mac Pro but after upgrading to an ATI 3870 I haven't seen it since.

But yes the scene/application would become very unstable but usually the upsidedown screen was enough warning so that I could save and exit Carrara without it crashing or hanging.

Usually when it does this, it freezes as soon as I click on File to save the file. :)

I had a similar problem on version 5  I know a small trick for Quadro FX series . ...... Go into your active profile settings then global driver settings , click on advanced settings, tick "Buffer flipping mode" and then choose "Block transfer mode ." This may work for you !

Hmmm.. My video card is just an ATI 3450 512MB PCIE,  I don't know if it has that option, but I'll try it if it does.  Thanks!

It once happened to me .Can't renember if it was C5 orC6. Don't know why it happens .It does happen you are not crazy .  :)

 I must be one of the lucky ones, then. I've had Carrara crash on occasion ("The application Carrara has unexpectedly quit") but never the weirdness you guys are experiencing.

 I'm using both Mac and PC. Never got this problem.

Quote - Well...  It just did it again.  Check this out...

I haven't used a PC in some time... but looking at that it seems you have WAY to many things open!!  ya, the processor(s) can handle all that but the vid card "stacks up" with all those underlying windows for other programs and basically over loads it...  again, been a LONG time since I was forced to use a PC so....?   But I'd try closing everything before opening any 3D program

I had it happen to me today (viewport  flipped image) - never had this before with C5 or C6????

Memory or open programs usage was not an issue.

I believe there are stability issues and we will be seeing a 7.01 very soon.

Heya, I get that same problem....

Currently, I'm using an older AGP ATI Radeon 1600Pro 128mb card. And my drivers are only a couple months old from the latest release. I suspect it might be an ATI driver issue.

Earlier this year, prior to falltime, I was using an nVidia Geforce 7900GS 256mb PCI-E video card. I never had that problem ever, with the current nforce drivers at the time. Unfortunately the card went up in smoke and I got a replacement PCI-E 2.0 spec 8600 card that I can't use in this older Asrock AGP/PCI-E combo board. Hence reverting to the older 1600Pro until I can make a system upgrade.

By the same token, I also sometimes get a blank assembly room, and I mean everything totally blanks out from the view. Sometimes I can get it to "flicker" back by using the camera pan controls, sometimes it sticks and sometimes it blinks out again.

On the odd and very annoying occasion, I'd get an "Error: Rendering Failed" type message in the assembly room window, and usually Carrara freezes up...

Using Carrara 6.2.1 , XP Pro, Q6600 cpu on an Asrock 4coredual-vista board, 2gb ddr ram, ATI Radeon 1600Pro...

And I've also got a shiny new 8800 in the box I can't use on this board either. I really need a better motherboard and more ddr2 or ddr3 ram.... (that 2gb is really limiting what I can render in a scene!)

Two Gigabytes, limiting, you should try 512Mbyte RAM for rendering--sniffle, sniffle, sniffle-cheap upgrade not applicable-similiar to buying parts for a Nash Rambler.  Jan

Sorry to hear Plutom,

I understand what your getting at. Your in more need of an entirely new machine rather than an upgrade thats unlikely to happen due to age and of parts required. True enough, its nice just to even still be able to use an app like Poser, Daz Studio or Carrara working with those restrictions at hand.

Some of my friends can't even use a program like Daz Studio due to their not very old laptop not having a proper 3d accelerator video display chip, even if they do have 1-2gb of ram and a 2000mhz+ cpu. If your able to run one of those programs and still make a render, count yourself lucky ;) 

What I didn't mention was i'm running into those limitations due to a few factors: image size, amount of content being put into a scene, using real outdoor 3d terrain / landscape instead of photo backdrops, and both sunlight and indirect lighting. You only need to browse my gallery and see some of the notes i've written about some of the images to see what I'm getting at.

;)

I see what you mean, I took a long look at your gallery-first you really do exceptional work!  I can see why 2Gigbytes may not be quite enough.   Jan