Poser 5 sr4.1 (windows) I have a pz3 that I set up and saved but when I try to open it poser gives me an empty scene with no lights. In hierarchy editor I get a list of stuff that looks like the figures parts with a colon, followed by a number but not in a hierarchy. I open the pz3 in wordpad and I can see that there is stuff in it. I have opened this file previously and added some lights last I remember. Any suggestions. Id like to recover this work if possible.

I've had this happen to me and once if I recall I was able to recover by editing the PZ3. If you'd like to send me the file I can certainly take a look at it. No promises but I'm willing to try.

ok, its in your e-mail. (from your website) fortunatly its not that big, almost everything calls on obj files.

Try to import the file instead of opening it. I had that problem once and importing worked, but opening didn't. Go figure!!

Import didn't do it. :( same results

OK I looked. Only half the file is there. There is too much missing for me to do anything with it, sorry. Do you have an earlier version you can continue working from?

blast. i didnt save any older versions :(

well, i at least remember what was in it and where. i just hate having to set up all those lights again. thanx for trying.

sigh. I've had this happen once too often. Corrupted PZ3 files are a big problem in P5 from my experience. I've lost deadlines on commercial work due to this annoyance, which is unacceptable. Of course corrupt files can also happen in other applications as well under certain circumstances, but Poser seems to do this "at will", and with very little chance of recovery. Hope it wasn't anything "urgent".

I've had this happen as often in PP as in P5. Scenes with V3 and M3 in them seem especially prone to it. IME, it's a good idea to save things to your library as you work: figures, poses, lights, etc. That makes it fairly easy to reconstitute your scene, should it be necessary. Even if you didn't do that, you'll probably find re-creating the scene very quick, compared to creating it in the first place.

Its not all bad for me, i didnt have any humans in the scene yet, just LCV1 interrior and a bunch of stuff inside. Most of the time "lost" was deciding on what to put in and where to put it. and it is a hobby pict. nobody waiting on it or paying for it. I've been using poser for over a year now (only p5) and this is the first time it has happend to me. i suspect (because i am on a laptop) that it may have gotten cut off when the computer went into hibranation (had to get off the train).

I'm not one to pop into a thread just to say, "Gee, that never happens to me!" But, in an effort to be helpful, I don't think I've ever had a corrupt pz3. With any version of Poser. Mayhaps something is awry elsewhere on your systems to cause this?

"i suspect (because i am on a laptop) that it may have gotten cut off when the computer went into hibranation (had to get off the train)." Well, that could be what caused it for you, but I've experienced it once a while back on a P4 2.4g desktop, after the scene seemed to save perfectly fine. Went to open it up the next morning, and poof. Gone. Then once on a Dual Xeon 3.6 workstation. Different machine, same scenerio. I was running P5 SR4 on WinXPpro with Service Pack 2.

Doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's usually at the most inconvenient times. Message edited on: 02/25/2005 14:14

Slightly OT here... but what used to really frustrate me was losing dynamic cloth information when saving a pz3. Eventually (I think) I sussed that Poser seems to need a single word name for the dynamic cloth object if a saved pz3 is going to retain the information properly. Even an underscore in an object name seems to be sufficient to cause problems when saving a pz3 with dynamics info.

Eventually (I think) I sussed that Poser seems to need a single word name for the dynamic cloth object if a saved pz3 is going to retain the information properly. Even an underscore in an object name seems to be sufficient to cause problems when saving a pz3 with dynamics info.

Interesting. Good to know. I hadn't realized that. Probably because I always use one-word names, usually of 8 letters or less. We only recently stopped using DOS at my office. :-P

I can't reproduce the problem I once encountered with underscores in prop names. I've tried naming the same object as Dyna_Test.obj and DynaTest_1.obj and they both save fine. I've also saved a simulation with ezzthetic's dynamic nightdress (which is named chemise01-EXP_1) and that too saves fine. I did encounter a real problem with underscores once and I'm going to keep watching to see if I can reproduce it... The problem with spaces in object names is indeed persistent. If I save a pz3 with the object named Dyna Test.obj then when I reload the pz3, Poser will inform me that it cannot find prop [Dyna] and all dynamic information is lost.