My Mangled Babies (or, Back Up Yo Shiznit)
polycounter lvl 18
When I was animating for my first job, we were using a custom version of Lightwave 5.5 (designated 5.7b, so maybe it was a true beta and not a custom hack ... bah, I can't remember, irrelevant anyway), whose essential improvement was to split transformation channels up so each could have its own key. I mean, this made it so you could have a key on rotateX on frame 30, but not one on rotateY or rotateZ. Simple, but crucial, right? We used it, and it was good.
Around Christmas, I was preparing for a trip home and putting a bunch of my work on my laptop to show friends and family. I no longer have a copy of LW5.7b, but I do have LW6, so installed it on the laptop and took it with me.
When the time came to show my stuff to an apathetic brother and transfixed mother, I realized that LW6 doesn't read the old LW5.7b files properly. Almost every null is offset +90 degrees on Pitch, and some have become Gimbal locked by the offset. I tracked down an unhackified copy of 5.5 and found that, unsurprisingly, it won't load the 5.7b format.
The clean 90 degree offsets weren't too difficult to fix. I wrote a MEL script that reads a .lws file, steps through it to find each broken null's Pitch channel and fixes each key therein. It was almost a fun script to write, using a $3000 program to do what a $0 Perl script could've accomplished if I only knew how to write Perl, but it only completely fixed the nulls which happen to have a coordinate-zeroing dummy parent that I created to avoid Gimbal lock while animating. The others are still broken in ways I don't have the scripting skills to work out. I've spent most of this morning trying to figure out the differences between the 5.7b and 5.5 formats in hopes that I can write a backwards-converter but without having a copy of 5.7b to experiment with, I've had little success.
As I ask more former co-workers if they still have a copy of LW5.7b on a CD somewhere and get more and more "no, sorry"s, the stress grows. This is nagging, piercing, agonizing worry, that's actually kept me up at night: it may be that I will never be able to look at my old work in an unmangled state again! It's also cut the greater part of the first third of my career off from future portfolios. It's old work, sure, but I think most of those old animations still hold up just fine, anyway.
There have been some threads on Polycount about how people lost work to hard drive crashes, and my thought is invariably "well, that sucks, but you obviously should've backed your shit up." Well, here I am, right with ya! I have multiple backups of my old work, but they don't help me when I neglected to back up a copy of the only piece of software that will view it.
Errmm ... so, back up your shit!
Around Christmas, I was preparing for a trip home and putting a bunch of my work on my laptop to show friends and family. I no longer have a copy of LW5.7b, but I do have LW6, so installed it on the laptop and took it with me.
When the time came to show my stuff to an apathetic brother and transfixed mother, I realized that LW6 doesn't read the old LW5.7b files properly. Almost every null is offset +90 degrees on Pitch, and some have become Gimbal locked by the offset. I tracked down an unhackified copy of 5.5 and found that, unsurprisingly, it won't load the 5.7b format.
The clean 90 degree offsets weren't too difficult to fix. I wrote a MEL script that reads a .lws file, steps through it to find each broken null's Pitch channel and fixes each key therein. It was almost a fun script to write, using a $3000 program to do what a $0 Perl script could've accomplished if I only knew how to write Perl, but it only completely fixed the nulls which happen to have a coordinate-zeroing dummy parent that I created to avoid Gimbal lock while animating. The others are still broken in ways I don't have the scripting skills to work out. I've spent most of this morning trying to figure out the differences between the 5.7b and 5.5 formats in hopes that I can write a backwards-converter but without having a copy of 5.7b to experiment with, I've had little success.
As I ask more former co-workers if they still have a copy of LW5.7b on a CD somewhere and get more and more "no, sorry"s, the stress grows. This is nagging, piercing, agonizing worry, that's actually kept me up at night: it may be that I will never be able to look at my old work in an unmangled state again! It's also cut the greater part of the first third of my career off from future portfolios. It's old work, sure, but I think most of those old animations still hold up just fine, anyway.
There have been some threads on Polycount about how people lost work to hard drive crashes, and my thought is invariably "well, that sucks, but you obviously should've backed your shit up." Well, here I am, right with ya! I have multiple backups of my old work, but they don't help me when I neglected to back up a copy of the only piece of software that will view it.
Errmm ... so, back up your shit!
Replies
Seriously I would never let a unbacked up file kick my ass if it tried anything I would be like..hey you get your bitch ass back in that folder before I cry!
Also It helps if you have a DVD Burner and a few spare DVD RW's
it's quite a heartwrenching thing. i've never experienced anything quite like that, though most of us have had some sort of outdated 3d file type shenanigans.
but it's always good to be reminded.. i've got a dvd burner that i have yet to use to back up 'ma shiz'. i shall do so shortly.
sad story
Jody
Sucks to be you mal!
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