UPDATE! Nil pointer error message - files will not open anymore :(
SileneUK
Posts: 1,975
I posted this in the Developer forum thinking the developer (Hudson?) might hang out there... as I cannot understand why this problem has suddenly started happening. This is with C 8.5 pro 64-bit (not Beta)
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/53758/
Any ideas? I am so discouraged that I am thinking of giving up on 3D, but have spent too much money so far to do so without trying to recover this. I have to save two copies of a very old file now as almost every time I open the last one worked on, this message comes up. I keep taking things out of the scene to see if I can narrow the problem down.
Cheers, SileneUK
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OK I found via Google someone had an issue like this a couple of years ago.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/21616/
There are two obj files (a spear and a club) that are used that I have used in many scenes in the past.
One other object is a ship from Faveral's Viking Village where I used the obj file and have in the past as well.
The rest are trees, terrains, etc from DAZ, except for one
terrain from a PA that was on SCg as a Carrara item.
There is one Genesis character dressed in DAZ clothing, much of which has been "haired" with Car Hair.
So this now to me has nothing to do with Inagoni's Baker or Deeper. Julien has been brilliant in trying to find the problem, but it is not his problem and I will contact him to let him know. I had not applied Baker or Deeper, it was just a coincidence that I was having trouble with the licence keys for his products, then this happened.
I still have no idea what the trouble is with this weird error message (see below), but am rebuilding the scene one element at a time. Some are saved in the browser, most not unfortunately.
:down: Silene
Hi Silene, sorry to hear about your woes. For me on 8.1 my fail to open car files have been mainly from having a disc that is almost full. It appears that the car file saves to a certain point and gives no evidence that it won't fit on your drive, or perhaps it can't squeeze a temp file in when it I saving? I have 8.5 but stay away from it at the moment. Other error on past has been from selecting a texture map in shader room but not actually putting one in there. I guess you have tried changing the car file to a zip file, then using win7 unzip , think it's called that, to unzip it, then change file type back to car and open?
Andy, If I unzip it... do I do that to Notepad? Julien from Inagoni was helping with that and he said the unzipped file was over a gig vs the 232mb car file size.
If I remove the offending line given at 3264... does that sort it? How do you resave back to Car? I have never done this before. But am willing to try as I really liked the original scene.
Thanks! Silene
So sorry for your troubles! I know the pain! Don't give up!
You can't open any file at all? Or do you mean a particular file with all those objects?
Have tried saving those objects, individually, to your Browser? If so, can you load them into an empty scene?
Also, are you bringing these objects into your scene as they came? Meaning, it is a little unclear if Faveral's ship is a Poser style model in a runtime, and you're importing the .obj file from the geometry folder in the runtime, or if you're loading it from Content or Smart Content browser.
Also, that thread you linked to... to put it politely, the OP had some issues that we, in the Carrara forum, weren't quite qualified to umm- well, let's just leave it at that. ;-)
Hi silene, copy your car file, then take the copy and change the file type from car to zip manually,
Use 7zip to unzip it.
if it works then that is good!
Take the resulting file and change the file type back to car file and try to open it in in Cararrara
Good luck!
Sorry don't know the answers to the other question, maybe Fenric can help?
Andy, I thought I had to Zip the file using WinZip or whatever... then just unzip it as a car file? OK, then Julien must have been going to examine the lines in the code. I can't go there I don't think very easily.
Kev, I opened Faveral's ship as an object using Carrara. Then I saved it to my browser. I didn;t need it to be anything except a stationary object so I didn't bring it in as a Poser/Runtime item. I have done this before with things... no problem
Oh I have made a mess... but am putting a new scene together again. At least my Genesis guy was OK in the browser. Dressed and all.
My only other possible bad bad move was that the scene was originally LARGE and of course that meant my Genesis guy was very small and I had to scale him up big time. But I have done that lots of times.
Thanks for the encouragement.... Carrara is a lonely furrow to hoe sometimes.... most of the time actually except for here!
:blank: Silene (ROFL....can't even sign off!)
ETA After you get that message... the file just won't open after a few attempts. That was how/when I found one of the previous ones I'd made that seemed sort of OK that I then opened and saved, then when I opened again, got the messsage, then it just rolled on from there with none opening at all, not even with the error message.
My recent rebuilds seem to be OK, but I have a ridiculous number of backup files hanging around now. Better to be safe than sorry again.
I just have the same message at the end of a render test avi, and it is not the first time.
The render is OK.
What that wants to say, mystery…
Happy that work for you !
hi Silene, is it working then?
here is a step by step (courtesy of Fentric?) , just in case, it probably wont work, but it has worked for myself and Philw in certain situations
if you are on windows, go to mycomputer, go to the directory where the car file is that wont open,
right click on it, copy and paste
in this new copy select the part that says 'car' change it to 'zip'
you'll get a warning window, ignore it
then use 7zip (must be as far as I know) to try and unzip this renamed file
you will probably get not my type error from 7zip. this means it wont work,
else
7zip will unzip your pretend file
if it does, replace the file type with 'car', then go to carrara and try and it should open
are you saving your carrara files as compressed? if so you are more likely to have errors
Thanks, Andy. I did do those steps finally the way presented. Sorry I got a bit gobbled about the problem yesterday. I had Carrara-fatigue.
The message appears for a while. Then the file just will NOT open at all. Just sits there at 0%. That's the file that I asked Julien at Inagoni about, eg whether having installed Baker & Deeper, that something might have happened. So, I have gone and left it even overnight to open as normal and it's still at 0% in the morning.
I did the procedure, several times with the file in question...the BIG one, and the file still just sits at 0%... no message anymore.
I made several copies of the file that gave the message (some were a bit smaller as they were incremental saves) and tried it with one of those, too. And doing the zip thingy does not matter, it still opens with the message.
Bless Julien Chaplier from Inagoni. Being a developer he wants to try and parse the file and find the offending item/line/code even though I have assured him that now I think, and he also agrees, it's not connected to his plugin at all! What a very very nice man, even if he can't find it. He recommended the above exercise, too. Please thank Fenric as well for this.
If there is any resolution, I will post it happily!
I am 70% into rebuilding the scene. It's the last book cover for my friend's Amazon site series and it needs finishing!
Thanks all for being helpful. I am glad I didn't carry on with Beta or they would have had to take me away in a straight-jacket. I have trouble enough with my learning curve as it is.
Cheers everyone! xx :cheese: Silene
Wish I could have been here sooner, because I would have said to not bother with the ZIP trick - that message will nearly always be "Error opening file".
You hit a very rare "real" error message - the C++ (C Plus Plus - hence "cpp") source file is Tree.cpp, and the error happened on line 3264 of that file.
Unfortunately, looking at the rest of the useful part of the file path: "3DDB" is the 3D Database which is the internal mechanism used to store all of the objects in your scene, and the Scene subdirectory which means that it's one of the actual scene items that show up in the scene tree down in the corner.
So Julian's certainly right: that's an actual error in the file - not a quirk of compression - and would require analysis of the internal structure of the file.
Prevention... All I have is to make sure your Carrara temporary directory is kept empty or nearly so, and that the disk it is on has lots of space.
Rare... that figures. :-S
So should I clear the temp directory after each successful save? I found it once....it's over in roaming or someplace similar? I keep all my Carrara files on an external drive. My library is on the main C drive, though.
Cheers for chiming in anyways... so far I am about 80% done now rebuilding and am saving after major edit or manipulation of my character. I do worry about this happening again... if I only knew what caused it! The only thing I was thinking about was consolidation of shaders operation? But I that quite some time before saving/closing the problem file which then gave the error message, then just would not open anymore.
8-/ x Silene
ETA: Found the tmp file folder and cleared it except for the current ones for the open files.
UPDATE!
From Julien at Inagoni today (I don't think he'll mind my sharing if it helps another):
The problem with the file is coming from the vertex object “boat.obj”. The object is present twice in the file (once with polygons, once without), and it seems that Carrara has an issue with the edges of the model (it’s running an infinite loop through the edges).
I kept only 3 edges and 1 triangle in the object and saved it in a new file. I can now open it up to 50% only, but you should give it a try: maybe I can’t open it because I’m missing some external objects or plugins.
If it still doesn’t work, I guess I can’t do much about it. But I would suggest that you work first on the boat.obj in another small file before inserting it in the scene.
I could not get the file to open or copy out of Dropbox to any other location. I don't know why I could not get it to open even in the Dropbox folder. It's OK, I have the scene almost rebuilt in another version and will finish it at the weekend.
Boat.obj is a little double ended rowboat that I got off ShareCG (I think). I brought it in as an object. I guess the way it was modelled caused the problem? But I have used this little boat in other scenes with no problem. Will not use it again and have removed it from my scene now.
Would it have mattered if I had done ,as I usually do with more complicated objects, and opened it separately in Carrara, then save to browser so it's a .car file? I don't see how that would change the vertices/polygons, etc. And why did it do it NOW and never before?
Thanks so much, Julien, that was amazingly kind of you to give so much help when it was not even your problem. Inagoni has just gone to the top of my list for plugins/accessories!
xx :-) SileneUK
amazing!
was the boat a figure by the way? ie rigged?
Maybe not relevent but
I have only gotten the Hudson error in C8.5 and mostly using duf content
mostly it has involved stuff loaded from DAZ that has no recognisable geometry as in an obj
an obj export of the item from DAZ studio saved in Carrara content browser best in those cases
use Bryce convert maps option to get it in textured and keep those maps, Carrara may look for them loading in the future.
So are you saying (apologies if I got it wrong), to open the item in DS and then export and open in Car and then save to browser vs just opening in Car and then saving to browser?
I am still not sure where I got this. I thought it was ShareCG but maybe not-- as I got a rowboat with oars from there and it's not double-ended but is also called boat.obj. I wonder if this is an item in a bundle. I am posting an image of the model view It did have a rudder which I removed near the stern, you can see the remains of it, but no sail. It was a long time ago I think or I am fairly sure I'd remember where I got it.
I wonder who Hudson is?
Cheers, Silene
ETA: OK it's from DAZ Viking Village Props http://www.daz3d.com/viking-village-props
I had taken the plain little boat and removed the embellished bow and stern along with the rudder in the vertex modelling room in carrara, so I must have loaded it from my DAZ content library into this scene many months ago and forgot where it came from. I did not save it to browser. I have deconstructed items before after un-protecting topology and not had trouble. So will have to be careful in the future!
Well the viking village is in Poser format so none of it should be giving any issues.
So not likely to be the issue unless loaded from smart content maybe and stuff like textures referenced through it.
If loaded from your content runtime there should be no problem.
It is mainly triax rigged props that are the issue for me.
They come in with bones and act oddly from the start.
Most of those can be simply exported as obj from studio and even imported as separate meshes by shading domain so even if they had rigged doors, rudders, wheels whatever it is and has depending on prop ie house, car, boat, alien spaceship, they can be posed often just by moving the hotpoint with caps lock on to have them pivot correctly.
Thanks, Wendy. I've done some of those things. Not because I completely understood them, but by trial and error! I did not know you could import by shading domains. I have de-constructed objects that way without any fuss in the past. And I am now messing about with a cloak that is actually for a G2F on a male Genesis figure rather well doing that as the parameters do not give enough movement, although I did increase the range on some of them, but doing it manually seems to get better results. I only discovered this last year. Before that I used to faff around with the magnet tool to bulk up some outerwear that was useful.
Cheers for the help! x Silene
Just noticed this thread, I can give you my experience(using Carrara Beta version) at getting the Nil pointer error in a very predictable way...
I find can hack bits out of Gn2 by unlocking with Fenric's tool and then unticking Protect Topology. By re-protecting and re-locking afterwards, Gn2 works fine after the surgery (reason for doing this is to get a geograft work around).
But... If I should try to go back into a figure afterwards without remembering to UNLOCK IT again, it immediately triggers the 'NIL POINTER ERROR'. This is not disastrous, but I've found you must save immediately, exit Carrara, then re-open the file. Attempting to carry onwards after getting this error will cause all sorts of Carrara weirdness and probably a total lock-up at some point.
Whilst this is probably unrelated to your original error, it should not put you off hacking stuff about provided you stick to the above routine.
A second point is using Gn2F clothes or poses on Gn2M (and vice versa). This will usually work if you duplicate the duf file then edit the file and replace Female with Male throughout (note you might need to unzip the duf file to edit it as many are zipped just like car files can be). Then place the file in its proper hierarchy in the Daz Library (e.g. Genesis 2 Male). I read this sometime ago (don't remember where) and it's supposedly based on the theory that the Gn2 male and female are based on the same mesh. I've tried it a couple of times and it can work well enough to make trying it worthwhile.
I posted this question earlier, then found this thread... I, too, am getting nil pointer errors when trying to open files.
File: /Users/build/DAZDevel/Build/Carrara85/lnstallerScripts/Common/../../Src/Kwak/PublicAPl/RenderSettings.cpp Line: 1257
I can't figure out where this path is, let alone what it means!
Files I create today, then close, will open. Some of my earlier created .car files will open, most won’t. Time stamp doesn’t matter, older and newer files won’t open. Fusion drive, external drives – location doesn’t seem to matter. I copied/zipped/unzipped/renamed Carrara files, deleted preferences, uninstalled and reinstalled Carrara, to no avail. Interactive Renderer set to Software or Open GL makes no difference.
Carrara 8.5.1 Pro Build 19
iMac (27-inch, Late 2013)
Yosemite 10.10.2
3.5 GHz Intel Core i7 processor
32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 memory
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4096 MB graphics