Saved scene file won't open - error message

onoratoartdesignonoratoartdesign Posts: 0
edited December 1969 in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

I was working on a scene all day, saving every few minutes. I went to render the scene and Daz studio froze up and then crashed. When I tried to open the scene again, nothing happens and I get an error message. the log file says "Json Parser (3688317,10): Unexpected end of file in string". I'm using Daz Studio 4.6 Pro on WIndows 7 64 bit. Any help getting the file back would be cool! Thanks!

Comments

  • ariocharioch Posts: 172
    edited July 2013

    As an "off the top of my head" guess, and being a techie type, I'd say that error is bad news. Scene files are binary DUF files, not plain text. That error tells me that the DUF file is corrupt and all the data isn't there anymore.

    If it was plain text, you could open the file in notepad and actually see where the text abruptly stops. It might be possible to do the same with binary files, but it would be more difficult to determine.

    I had problems with several scene files in the recent past. Animations I worked on for 40+ hours simply ... disappeared. Only the first 30 frames remained of 300 and 400 frame animations. Luckily the scenes themselves weren't hosed, just all the work I'd put into the animations was gone.

    Long story short, unless you made a backup of the scene file, I think you're out of luck :(

    EDIT: I just read in another thread that DUF files are actually compressed text files. You need an app like 7zip to extract the text file from the DUF to see the plain text. I just tried this on one of my DUF files and I can see all the parameters for my scene in plain text. You could try this with your scene file and see if it ends abruptly or maybe if there are some odd characters in there. From there you might be able to see what needs to be done to fix your file. Just a guess, though.

    Post edited by arioch on
  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 100,781
    edited December 1969

    You can also uncompress (and compress) .duf files with the Batch Convert pane in DS itself.

  • KeryaKerya Posts: 10,943
    edited December 1969

    For the future ... save under scenename01, scenename02 and so on ...

  • onoratoartdesignonoratoartdesign Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    Okay cool! I'll give that a try and I'll report back!

    Thanks for the help and info. Next time I'll be making copies and copies of the copies.

  • onoratoartdesignonoratoartdesign Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    You guys are brilliant! It worked perfect! I uncompressed it with the batch converter in Daz Studio, which gave me an error. But when I looked in the folder I found a .tmp file. I opened it in Notepad and found it ended in the middle of a word. I then uncompressed a similar scene I was working on and opened that in notepad. Using 'find' I found the line that was cut off, which was the second to last line! Saved as a .duf file and opened it with out any problems in daz!

    Thanks so much!

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 100,781
    edited December 1969

    Could you make a bug report - bugs.daz3d.com , it's a separate account from the store and forum so you will need to sign up - attaching the broken version of the file? This shouldn't happen, but they need to figure out the cause before they can fix it so any evidence will help.

  • onoratoartdesignonoratoartdesign Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    ok just did. Thanks again

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 100,781
    edited December 1969

    Thank you.

  • SundriesSundries Posts: 12
    edited December 1969

    Uncompressing and readding the last lines from another file worked like a charm. Thanks for the suggestion! Saved a render.

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