I made out a report on AM reports at the top of the month about this, but it's not even been looked at, so I'll post here in case someone can help me out.

I got this one PRJ and it's got a lot of stuff, models, volumetrics, like 8 chors, all kinds of stuff. Anyways, it's pretty buggy as it crashes pretty much with everything I do. Now I would just go about setting up a new PRJ and whatnot, except this one has lots of stuff, and I might say I'm a wee bit disorganized with files and folders

Anyways, one of my main two issues with it, is it crashes upon opening. It is very touchy and will open completely like only every fifth time (there's no real pattern). Anyways, once it is open, it's usually fine, except now I'm having this trouble, which is of more importance. I begin the render to file process, and it starts rendering, and it was rendering fine, until frame 57. Then it crashed. I tried it several times, each time it crashed. Anyways, I got it, frame 58 and 59 rendered, but when it got to 60, it crashed. Now I can't even open the PRJ without it crashing so I'm kind of stuck. Now I have a lot of issues where AM will crash anyways (I believe it has to do with it not being compatible with OS V10.5.8) but I can get by for the most part.

Now I'll upload the PRJ if i can find all the files associated with it, but I dunno, there's a lot of files to look for. Oh, and one last note, the project was made originally in V13 but I now use V15.

All the files are text files so open them up and chek them out for any obvious rubbish or missing bits. The files are XML like in there are opening and closing tags around block of data.

Cheers

Oh dear no, code

Ok, I'll check em out, but my understanding of coding is limited to AS2 and some very minor CSS. But I'll give it a try, on a back-up copy or something

hey, AM code ain't too bad to look at, except I don't know what to look for that's out of place, I got rid of some animation files which will hopefully help

Why not save the chors separately? When you load a chor it loads all the models it needs. All of TWO was done with saved chors and no PRJs.

Of course, you save the models out too.

And then, maybe you'll find out it's one chor that's the problem. Or a model that's in one chor.

When you keep so much all in one bundle it makes a problem with too many variables to sort out.

hmmm, interesting, scene 2 will be used in this method. And yes, I save the models out to individual files. This is my first time actually animating something, so I don't really know any proper organization scheme. At first I was attempting to do it all (like a whole scene) in a single chor, but now I make a new chor for each shot which has saved me some headaches I was having earlier, but more general animating tips, the better!

if all else fails
start AM holding down the shift key
it will open up fresh and you can import the chor one at a time and rebuild

If I can get this one render to complete, I'm gonna start it up fresh. It renders a few frames, then crashes! But I'm closer, and I'm sooo thankful that Al showed me about the rendering each frame to a file technique, that has sooo saved my butt with this render!

well, i got it to render everything but the last frame which is acceptable. I noticed one thing that didn't happen in the final render, but it's minor enough to leave alone cause I don't wanna sit through trying to render that scene again!

Sounds like you're making progress with this, but definitely in the future, save each and every element as a separate file. Create a work folder and inside there, have folders for models, chors, materials, actions, etc. etc. If you can open your buggy project, don't render. Go through it, click on each element in the pws, and "Save as...". At the very least, with a little detective work you may be able to determine where the bug is exactly.

And, as the code is plain text, you can look at it and "understand" it, but trying to fix it manually is pretty hit and miss.

Couple of things I learned through the years about AM. Usually a crash is due to one issue, whether it's a problem with a model, the code, a jpg, etc. I have figured out almost all my AM issues by process of elimination. Most of the time I could figure out the problem by backtracking my steps when a problem starts to rear it's ugly head. I do save often, and save incremental project files such as Sub1a.prj, Sub1b.prj, etc. That way, if I have a problem, I can easily go back to a previous version of the project. Off course I delete all old versions once the project is done. I also save models in progress in the same fashion.

Another major reason for bugs and crashes is the handling of image files. I used to import image files of any size and type. Often something about an image would make AM crash or give me a weird warning message. Modifying an image in Photoshop could also cause some problems. Don't get me wrong, this would not happen very often, but it has happened. Again, back up stuff. Anyways, nowadays, I usually stick to jpgs and tga image files that are not much larger than 2000x2000 for the biggest of them and usually average around 500x500. Many rendering issues can be traced to images that are either too large or that have something in them that AM just doesn't like.

When a project does crash, I think back to what my last change was. Did I add an image file, did I add one or more lights, did I change a model, etc? As has been pointed out, keeping projects smaller and organized really helps in tracking issues. I remember one crash that was caused by adding a light to my chor. The light somehow corrupted my project, which I saved by going back to a previously stored version.

Your AM issues may be compounded by the fact that you are experiencing possible compatibility issues with AM and your Mac OS. Since I am using a PC, I could not even speculate on workarounds for that. But, all the other tips should help in pointing you in the right direction.

Eric

yeah, I can trace some issues to stuff I've done, but I mean, it does happen where I'll load a blank PRJ and AM will crash anyways. It's quite finicky on Leopard from what I can tell, because I could run V13 on my windows vista quite well, but V15.i and Mac OS10.5.8 don't like each other much. What bugs me, is that when I bought the laptop, about a month or so later, they released Snow Leopard, which AM apparently works mych better with, but, what can you do without paying for the upgrade to Mac OSX?

Crazy thoughts, but...could you sell your laptop and take a smaller hit than upgrading to the new OS? I have no idea what the upgrade costs, nor what the resale value of an almost new Apple laptop is. Then buy a new or slightly used laptop with the new OS. On the other hand, if you are seriously considering putting in a great deal more time into your project, you might want to consider buying a PC desktop for the task, if that's at all feasible. Just rambling thoughts.

Eric

ps I had an issue with AM crashing upon loading a blank project once too. It was caused by an incompatible plugin that I had loaded into AM's hxt folder.

Well, I think the upgrade is only like 40 dollars. And most of the reason I bought a laptop is 1.) Already have a desktop, but sort of converted it to the family machine and is now slow as heck) and two, I'm in theory going to school in the fall, so something portable is what I needed. If I were to get another desktop, I'd seriously look into building one from scratch

The Snow Leopard upgrade is $25.

whoa, when I checked it before, the exchange rate was much different, we seem to be almost dollar to dollar with the states again