Last night I was working on a long scene and it looked OK.
Now I just opened the scene and continued working. I worked on a few character drawings at the beginning of the scene and saved my work. Then I advanced my cursor in the timeline to work on subsequent drawings and discovered that they are now blank. The characters that were fully drawn out seem to have disappeared form the project.
One thing I remember doing last night was to renumber the drawings using the “Drawings > Rename by Frame” menu in the X-sheet view.
I am sure the original character drawings must still be there somewhere in the project and that the whole thing can be retrieved. But I need help.
Any ideas?
try going to a blank frame on that drawing expanding out the left hand side of the menu and putting in some different drawing numbers like 2,3,4 etc and see if any drawings appear.
Thanks…
I’m not sure what you mean by “expanding out the left hand side of the menu” but last night I did try to type in some other (lower digit) numbers, to see if old drawings appear, and they didn’t. :’(
I tried again just now and also did not get any old drawings to appear. :’(
I also zoomed out drastically on the camera view, to see if drawings are repositioned and did not see any drawings there, neither with the new or the old drawing numbers. :’(
I hope this can be fixed because I am far along with the scene, which is now 1109 frames long.
I’m sure ToonBoom tech support will be able to help me, but I don’t know if they check this forum over the weekend.
yeah you knew what I was talking about.
That was my best guess at how you might be able to get them back if they are still there.
Yeah I have noticed they don’t really check the forum over the weekend. It doesn’t sound good though.
Thanks for trying.
I hope tech support will check this post on Monday and help me resolve the issue.
Have you verified the drawings have not been deleted?
Browse to the ELEMENTS\DRAWING folder inside your project.
There will be a folder for each drawing layer in the project (i.e., if the layer in your project is called MONSTER the path will be ELEMENTS\DRAWINGS\MONSTER).
Inside the MONSTER folder there will be TVG files, one for each frame; for example, monster-1.tvg, monster-2.tvg, monster-3.tvg, etc.
If all are present, and the file size for each is is greater than zero, try importing all of the TVG files for one of the layers into a new project. In Animate Pro, it’s FILE->IMPORT->IMAGES.
Hopefully, the drawings weren’t deleted or corrupted as 1109 frames is a significant amount of work!
Hello,
Yes, the drawing are there. However, Each drawing can only be opened in ToonBoom and ToonBoom does not allow 2 projects to be opened at the same time. The original drawings are numbered in sequence as they were drawn, and that sequence is a totally mixed sequence compared to the drawing numbers that show up in the X-sheet after I used the “rename drawing by frame” command.
What would be great for me is if there was a way for the X-sheet to recognize which old drawings correspond to the new numbers on the X-sheet and simply connect the new numbers back to source media.
Is that possible?
Hello,
For future reference, if you have an emergency situation, the best thing to do is to email support directly, support@toonboom.com.
From what I understand, somehow your drawings and your x-sheet have gotten disconnected. You said that you did a rename by frame.
When you open your file now, what do you see in the x-sheet? Do the numbers progress along with the frame number? I.e. are they 1, 2, 3, etc? (Could also be 1, 2_1, 3_1 because if it tries to rename the file but that name already exists, then it will write it will an underscore). Or are they in the original order that you drew them? I.e. 1, 4, 3, 5, 2 kind of thing?
What I’m trying to determine here is whether the x-sheet was renamed, but the drawings weren’t, or whether the drawings were renamed, but the x-sheet wasn’t.
What you could do is go back and rename the drawings by hand so that they match up again, but doing this with 1000+ frames would be time consuming to say the least. Before you go ahead and do that, I would suggest sending an email to support@toonboom.com, and they will set up an ftp where you can upload your scene file, and then they can take a look at it to see if there’s anything else that can be done first.
~Lilly
Toon Boom Support
Lilly,
Thank you for looking into this and for clarification.
I did in fact rename by frame more than one time (I think I did it 2 times). I was unaware that renaming 2 times would cause a sort of discrepancy.
You are right, some of the drawings are now labeled as 1, 2, 3, … and some have underscores, like 10_1, 11_1, 12_1… etc.
So, from what you are saying I understand that the second renaming of drawings created a conflict. Makes sense, now that you explain it.
Due to the fact that this scene came to a halt, I temporarily switched working on another project, altogether, and am on a deadline today. So, I will revisit this scene as soon as I am done with the other project and try renaming. If that doesn’t work, I will email support directly.
Thank you for all your help.
Thank you for your patience and good luck with your project. Feel free to email support@toonboom.com when you would like to continue investigating this problem.
~Lilly
Toon Boom Support