2.40 alpha ate my character!

Support Basics & Interface
#1

Okay, I had just finished rigging a character and was deleting some unecessary vertex groups from a mesh parented to an armature, when I deleted the wrong group on accident. I hit Ctrl+Z and nothing seemed to happen, so I decided to reopen the file (which was saved before I deleted the vertex group) then blender crashed. So I opened it back up, but whenever I try to open that file in blender it crashes. So I opened the file by right clicking on the blend file, dragging it to the blender 2.40 icon, and clicking “open with.” Blender still crashes. Is there a way to save all my rigging work, or am I out of luck?

Actually, I didn’t lose that much work, because I had a separate file of the (naked!) guy rigged and all I had added was a cloak, but I would like to know if this is because blender 2.40 is unstable and if I can get back the old file. For future reference you understand.

Thanks,
LGM

#2

Open a new file and append it.

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#3

Nope, that crashes it too. I’ve re-done all the work now (it was much faster this time around) so I’m not at a standstill, but this makes me a little nervous about using the alpha now. I mean, I knew it was unstable . . .

LGM

#4

I would say, open it with a previous version… that will probably work.

#5

No, that won’t work because I’m using the new armature system from the alpha version. Thanks, though.

LGM

#6

Hmm, you are in quite a pickle… I would say just screw the dead file and start from the non cloaked guy.

#7

Put the file in the bug tracker so that the coders can use it to find out what is causing the crash. (If you are using 2.40alpha1 you can also try and use a more recent CVS build and see if it will open it, since it may be a bug already fixed).

2.40alpha1 is NOT 2.40

an alpha release is likely to have crash causing bugs due to the small number of people who have tested it (although this is much less likely when talking about open source since many users use CVS versions for day to day work).

Ton may well be able to recover the data for you but no promises. Put a request in with your bug report that if possible you would appreciate the data being recovered.

LetterRip

#8

Thanks, actually, as I’ve said I’ve re-done all the lost work. It wasn’t that much, but I was wondering if there were any tricks (like appending, even though that didn’t work) to recover lost work just for the future. I will submit it in the bug tracker.

Thanks all,
LGM

#9

For future reference, I have a much more important piece of information for you: Yes, alpha versions are unstable. That’s why they’re called alpha. Beta versions are more stable, but not yet as stable as releases, while releases are the most stable.

You understand.

#10

I understand that. It’s just that I’ve fallen in love with the new armature system, and my new character is rigged with that system. I can’t use the old 2.37a version when I use this character. So, by “future reference” I meant that when I animate this guy I wanted to know any tricks to retrieving information from corrupted blend files in case, after hours of animating, blender crashes.

Thanks all,
LGM

#11

When Ton gets free time (Ha!) maybe he could be requested to provide a tutorial that technical people could use for blend recovery…

LetterRip