Scene will not open most of the time after save.

[wacom]

I have a few scenes that now I can't open MOST of the time and can sometimes merge into a new scene. Regardless of how I get to the scene, when it loads, all the shaders in the scene are disconnected from the material port. To add insult to injury, MANY of the shaders seem to have disappeared.

I was using a compound on one material that was the same in each scene- does this cause a similar problem for other people?! These also have a sprite shader attached AND a raytype switch shader.

90% of the time these scenes crash XSI 64bit OR 32bit- and I'm using no 3rd party shaders etc.

Any ideas? Is there hope of recovering my shader trees?

Thank You,
-g

[Hirazi Blue]

Based (solely, I must add) on this page from the Softimage WIKI, I'd say: try to run runonce.bat

[xsisupport]

In the past, I've had some cases of disconnected nodes in the render tree, and the solution was TS13514010. However, I don't expect that to work in this case. I'm looking at a customer scene right now with the same problem as your describe, and setting XSI_FORCE_SHADER_RENESTING_DURING_LOAD didn't help.

Can you recover the materials from a backup of the scene?

[wacom]

Well...one of the scenes suddenly opens...so I don't know what is going on really. In the old backed up one some of the materials shaders vanished...and others were still around, but everything was disconnected. The node/shader that always seems to disappear for sure is the raytype switch node.

I ended up going back to an earlier scene, and just saving out the materials as a preset, and then applying them back to a scene with the new elements added.

The other scene is still corrupted/broken and I can't open that one MOST of the time. I think I went back and opened a back up version, which was fairly messed in terms of the shaders, but at least my meshes were still there. The odd thing is that I exported part of the mesh from that scene as an OBJ and imported it into an earlier scene, saved that under a new name with the newly altered shader (no compounds), and then exported the whole object to a new scene as a model. The first time I imported the model, all of the materials had disconnected themselves from the Material node, HOWEVER, I tried re-importing the model and the second time it came through just fine.

Very odd to say the least...and now I fear that the problem is lurking somewhere WAY back in my files. Luckily the models and their shader trees are really simple and the scenes are mainly just ones I'm using to model in.

If I can find a more consistent rhyme or reason to this error/bug/issue I'll be sure to pass it along.

[wacom]

OK, spoke too soon yet again! So now my imported model's shaders are all corrupted. Some things were disconnected, some things showed they were connected, but were not, and many shaders/nodes now have two out ports?!

Now I tried to go back and reconstruct the model the same way as stated before...in a totally new scene...and um...it's fine. Kind of confused at this point and REALLY sorry that there is a lack of consistency on my part AND what appears to be this error.

BTW- all the materials have their own name...I'm not using the scene name or any material* on this model's shaders.

[wacom]

OK, so now I bring that model (a very basic tree), the one that appears fine, into my scene. Everything is going fine, I'm running some instancing tests with a simple ICE tree, just trying to get a ball park idea of what my shadow map size might be for my main light.

Then, I decide to randomize the rotation of the trees by cone, and turn the shadows off on the light for faster preview. All of a sudden things are taking about 10X as long to render AND my main light appears 2X brighter?! No FG on or anything "special" this is just a simple pre-viz scene to test a few looks for a project.

Looking through the render info...it looks like it's hanging on the simple, small tiff texture map I'm using for my sprite shader's matte.

So I take away the randomize by cone angle node, and all of a sudden it doesn't hang on the texture anymore, but continues to render...but EXTREMELY slowly and with the same weird light problems etc.

I close the scene...try to reopen...CRASH...now it will not open. I think the tree has something VERY wrong with it!? Why would things work fine though for X amount of time...then go all oddball and corrupted?

What should I do? I'm kind of freaked that any scene I open now will get hosed.

*******************

I re-open SI after failing to get a merge with a new scene using the debugging settings method and loads what looks to be my last attempt at a merge, saying it has recovered from a crash. I take a few looks at the scene, delete the scene default light, and do a test render...things are still all messed. So I try going to the main light and turning it down...and then back up to what they were previously. Amazingly things look correct now even though the settings are all the same as when they looked hosed. OK so I decide to save the scene...CRASH!

So what do I have to do? This project is a personal project, but I have a new payed project starting tomorrow...and my client doesn't want to hear about scene debugging etc. Should I just re-install SI and hose my user settings or something? I really want to avoid having this issue again if I can.


BTW- here is the error message I've seen displayed a few times- there was also one with unfold saying the plugin was not installed, but for some reason I could not force a screen capture. This one I have posted here is coming up a lot though.

[wacom]

Based (solely, I must add) on this page from the Softimage WIKI, I'd say: try to run runonce.bat

I'll give that a try- I can't see how it would hurt! Thank you!
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I'm in contact with Kosta from the "Autodesk Quality Assurance" team and am going to send him the files to look over. I'll be sure to post what ever they find.