I was working on an animation in C2 on one computer at work. a 5 sec scene, i was using particle system, lights, etc..everything set up..i had initially saved the file, then did a 'save as' and resaved the file under a different name then burned it to cd and brought it home to work on. but when i loaded the file at home nothing was the same. it was like it was with the initial save. lights id set and had animated werent showing up. the particle systems showed up under the master objects but not the universal objects. im frustrated beyond belief at this pojnt to think all the work id done is gone. any ideas what i could have done wrong? tia..

Do you have the same patched version on both machines? -Kix

yes...everythings pretty much the same...id brought it home to render and tinker with some more since my machine at home is faster..but when i opened the file i couldnt believe it...i just couldnt figure out what could have happened...

Are the file versions on the two computers the same? I.E. is the "saved" version the same as the "save as" version.?

i saved the file i was working on then also did a 'save as' right after..everything should have been exactly the same...which is why this is so puzzling...

I was wondering if you'd actually checked the first saved file? But really I'm just fishing here: I agree it doesn't make much sense. Could it have something to do with the CD?

You could check the time/date stamp on each file and see if they are as they should be.

yeah theyre like a couple minutes apart...now when i do a 'save as' and the little pop up comes up asking about 'saving internally, externally' or the other option..which should i choose? i got to work today..and the copy id saved here at work on the hard drive is in exactly the same shape as the other one id burned and taken home...luckily i remember what i was doing so it didnt take as long to set everything back up, but still...

The save internally etc dialog is about wether or not image texture elements should be saved within the .car file or just kept as a path to the file on your drive. Internally takes up more space but save having to maintain all the image texture files on your system for the future. The only thought on this is that once when I saved files everything went as expected but in reality I had run out of disk space. Carrara 2.1 on winxp reported no errors and none of the files were actually saved. I only discovered the problem when I exited Carrara. I lost hours of work.

i hadnt thought of that...and it probably wont tell me if i have run out of space..i do remember when i went to render the project, just to check it out, i hit render and nothing happened, i had all my animation settings as usual, but nothing happened...and when i set it to batch render the file itself it rendered it the way id originally saved it...hmmm..that gives me something to check into... these computers at work are p4 1.4 with 256 megs of memory and 2 hard drives a 12 gig and a 7 gig...we're still trying to convince them that the computers we need in the graphics area need to be more powerful than the ones they use to run word and excel...sigh... thanks...