The two tanks shown here were built from the same treads. The left hand one, Tank 'A' was built first. I duplicated the document, deleted the tank body, cloned the treads to make double width, and added a new body. Voila! Tank 'B'.

Both run fine in their respective docs. Both have been dragged to the browser. Tank 'A', when inserted into a scene runs fine. But note the sequencer for Tank 'B'. The left hand time-track is from it's home doc. where it was built. The right hand one is from the scene in which I want to use it. Where did all the keyframes go?

I'm not sure but i think it has something to do with the way you have two diff files? how did you get the tank from file 1 to file 2?... if I have this right you copied the second tank.. then pasted? try "importing" the file.. that should preserve the animation.. i think anyway from what i got out of what you've stated here

No, I copied the first tank. I went to the file where Tank#1 lived, selected it, did a CTR_C, Then did a CTL_V and pasted a copy right into the same folder. So now I have T-1.car, and T-1copy.car, then I renamed my copy. So in all important respects, T-1 and T-2 are the same tank. Then I cloned the treads and built a new body for T-2.

What strikes me as weird, is that both tanks animate just fine in their own documents. Then each tank got dragged into the browser. When I retrieved them and inserted them into the city scene, Tank#1 runs fine, and Tank#2 has lost all its keyframes. Why did I lose the keyframes in one case, but not the other?

only thing I can think of is that you are doing something differant with one that your not doing with the other.... only other thing i can think of is that when one is imported then the other, there are those items that carrara sees as the same item and it deletes or changes something so it doesn't get confused with 2 of the same item? just a guess... like i said before though.. save each file... then use the file menu and "Import" each files into the main scene.. should work

After much time lost trying, I think it's time to give up and just build a new tank. Your suggestion that Carrara was confusing the two documents sounded really good, so I renamed the tank, renamed all the moving parts and tried again. No movement. Then I went back and moved all the keyframes forward by one frame, so all renamed parts are now in a different position. No movement. Then I imported the tank. The treads looked OK, but the rest of it was a scrambled mess. [there was keyframe info on the treads, however] Then I exported it as an .obj, and re-imported. Now there was no keyframe info, all the names had been abbreviated, textures gone...another fine mess. Time for a new tank...from scratch.

As a footnote to the above: here's the tank as it came in when I imported it. I went back, tried again, and checked the animation. The scrambled, distorted pieces worked just fine!

But by the time I sort them out, I can re-build another.

Boy oh boy, you are having a rough time of things. Glad to see you are perserving, give it time, you are probally doing something on accident that you aren't realizing you are doing, go through all the steps in your head and remember the steps you took, and try not to repeat mistakes. I remember when I first started using Carrara I kept making silly mistakes like this. Also, once again I'd like to recommend that if resources permit that you seriously consider upgrading to CS4, it fixes a lot of the user errors you could make, as well as some quirks in the timeline. Brian

Brian: yeah, some days can get a little tense. The most frustrating part is that things that work on Monday, don't always work on Tuesday. It's the on-again, off-again, that gets me down. On the other hand, I'm getting some good results that keep me stoked. [I've appended one here.] This is the season for less modeling and more animating. I'm getting a library of clips that has prompted the purchase of Adobe Premiere for editing, and I just got a digital tape recorder to capture sounds, voice bites and music.

And, I just got Carrara 4.3...life is full. Maybe Maya can wait.