I'm using Cartoon Animator 4 Pipeline on a 2019 MacBook Pro with the latest operating system. Just worked 8 hours in composer mode replacing and resizing sprites, moving bones, etc. It was very difficult work and so I was careful to press "command S" every few minutes. Finally I finished my work and closed Cartoon Animator. When I closed it I was not asked if I wanted to save the project. This came as no surprise since I had already pressed command S for the thousandth time. Then later when I reopened the project I was back to square one. NONE of the work I had completed in 8 hours had been saved. It was just as if I had never made even a single edit to the file. I did an exhaustive search of my entire hard drive but was unable to find a file with the lost work.

Hi...

Sorry to hear you have had problems with saving your work. 

Although obviously a little late now, it is not recommended to keep overwriting the same project file as this just leaves you with one file which could be vulnerable to corruption if you encounter a hardware problem or power outage. Instead it is highly recommended to save to a new file at regular intervals by simply by clicking the + ADD button at the bottom of Content Manager. This method is best because you will be able to visually see the saved projects are there in Content Manager and you will not have any doubts if the project was saved correctly.

By always adopting the "SAVE AS" method you will also always have a working version of the project available to drop back to should you encounter a problem with your latest save.


                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com

Thanks for your help Peter. But honestly? I find this hard to believe.

Have you tried going to 'open recently and seeing if the project will open that way?  I did the same thing you did and I was able to open the file I'd created.  

Hi oldschool! Thanks for your suggestion. The open recent function is broken. But I know it wouldn't have worked anyway because I did a search of my entire hard drive for files ending with "ctProject" and it didn't come up. Exploring Peter's suggestion I discovered that not only can you save a project by clicking the plus sign in "content manager" (project tab), but if you click the "actor" tab and then the "custom" tab and then select "character" under "Actor custom" then you can hit the plus sign to save the character only. I've done this several times and after each time I quit Cartoon Animator, and then started CA up again with a fresh new project and inserted my custom character, and the character was exactly the same as it was when I saved it. I like this method for two reasons. First, the project tab is not available in composer mode, but the actor tab is available. So I can save my character without having to go back into stage mode. Second, I can insert my character into any project.

Thanks again for your help!