I've got a scene I'm working on and it's 45MB. It contains a Poser character plus two mesh trees but otherwise its all Bryce - terrains, lattices and primitives. I've certainly worked on larger scenes before without this ever happening. The scene is blocked out, my lighting and textures are set and I'm ready to add that final clutter of foliage, etc. and call it done! I open up the scene file and all my lattices have gone invisible! I see their names, I can select them and Bryce shows me a box but there's nothing there. If I bring the selected invisible lattice into the Terrain editor its black. I had a gate lattice and over a 100 low res lily pad lattices and now I've got what? A 101 boxes that show nothing when I render! lol Also some of my picture textures turned black. Whatever picture texture I had originally there, it's now just an all black picture. The gate used one of the picture textures but the lily pads used procedurals. Yes I have a backup file and its suffering from the same symptoms ;) So I deleted all the invisible lattices and recreated them - had to reposition and rotate a 100 lily pads on my pond again! lol - and everything now seems fine. I would really love to avoid having this happen again - wasted a whole weekend recreating what I had already done when I could have been finishing the darn scene. It takes me long enough as it is to finish something without this happening! ;) Anybody care to speculate on what the heck went wrong? I've got a K2 400, Win98 SE with 128MB RAM.

What happens if you render? Are all your lattices there in the render? If they are you didn't need to re-do 101 lily pads, not sure, you didn't mention that. When dealing with large scene files Bryce will make your wireframes into boxes, now this usually only happens when you are moving the camera around so your problem is kinda unique. But, you will also will want to check the attributes of a "boxed" mesh to see if the "show as box" attribute is on. Perhaps that happened, somehow. But...I think your problem comes down to having so many objects, and polygons and bryce is just switching to showing your meshes as boxes, I think everything is fine. Similar things have happened to me. The black texture thing. This happens sometimes, usually all you have to do is click on the "T - Procedural Texture" dot or the "P - Image texture" dot, whichever texture they use and the little thumbnail of said texture will appear again. Agent Smith

Oh, how to fix Bryce from doing this mesh-into-a-box thing? Simple, buy more ram. More memory allows you to open bigger files. Otherwise...what I do is take (especially) any Mesh Imports,Poser Figures and/or hi-res Terrains/Lattices that are in my scene, position them where and how I want them, and then intentionally turn them into boxes in the attributes dialogue. This will help Bryce be able to show other meshes as wireframes and not boxes as it relieves some of that memory usage. Agent Smith

Thanks for responding AgentSmith but they are truly not there. They do not show up when I render, I checked the attributes on most if not all the lattices to see if I had accidentally made them invisible or show as box. And if my system was getting sluggish then all the items in the scene would be showing as boxes and not just my ghost lattices. It's as if Bryce remembers they were there and remembers their position and dimensions so it shows me this box when I select them but they are not there! lol I was even able to use Copy Matrix on the ghost gate to place the new gate into the scene.

Could be the hidden option got enabled on them ( this would keep them from rendering ). But I don't think that's the problem. When thing like materials show up black in the labs, it's not a good sign. I only had it happen once with B4 and I never recovered the file. Something I do when working with scenes with complex objects. After I have an object created and positioned, I save it in the create library. That way if anything happens not all is lost. When I finish the project ( and have a file that open & close properly ), I delete the objects out of the library.

I think the answer is definitely RAM. W98SE runs various housekeeping tasks in the background when the users are't looking, if jade had a whopping Bryce file open when Windows was performing any kind of write-back file operation, that would account for the loss. If there isn't enough RAM, then Windows pages out to virtual memory, and to cut a long story short, that's when you get problems - often. It is possible to set Windows so that it doesn't do these things when you don't want it to, but the best answer is more RAM. The other temporary solution is to create smaller files, save them as bryce object files, work on each of the smaller components seperately, and only bring them together when you render. If you look on my gallery, you'll see an image of a sand galleon. I did that with only 64MB of RAM under Win98SE in Bryce 3 by the above method regards peejay

Sounds like not enough RAM to me as well. The file size is 45MB and you only have 128MB of RAM in your machine. Bryce is probably running out of memory before it can load all of the textures and lattices. RAM is very cheap these days (and you need a lot for Bryce). I just added 512MB of RAM to my G4 for around $79 bucks, that brings my total RAM up to 896MB. I usually allocate up to 600MB of RAM just to Bryce5. Just to give you an idea of how much RAM I use, my "Birth of Venus" image (in the Bryce gallery) is a 235.6MB Bryce file. In fact my average Bryce file size is around 75 to 100MBs. Without at least 600MB allocated to Bryce I would not have been able to finish these pieces.

I use virtual memory to pump it up. I started on a powermac66 w/16MB (!) doubled to 32 w VM when I was learning Bryce2. Now I have G4 w 640MB that I pump to 990 (max). It works better- actually some of my scenes are impossible otherwise. My latest has over 100 lattices: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=146475&Start=1&Artist=inyerface&ByArtist=Yes

This isnt much of a help to you but im woring on a scen on over 150mb no problem. Tuch wood :D

Definitely a RAM problem. I found Bryce does weird things anytime a file gets close to HALF the total RAM. Also, have atleast 200 or so megs of disk space available for file swapping and use the task bar or ctrl-alt-del to shut down any unnecessary programs (and there are lots of them).

Well it's a definite that you can never have enough RAM but I've worked on scenes much larger than this one was. It gets a little logy but there's things you can do to increase Bryce's response time. I have it from a good authority (Paul Pappathan aka Pinhead) that you should never group or put into a family a large number of lattices. Paul is a master with lattices and he says Bryce can go wonky if you do that. ;) And wonky is a technical term btw. lol Anyways, all's well that ends well - I did get the image finished and posted. I just want to know what happened so I can make sure it never happens again. Thanks again for all the help and advice. I appreciate it.