I really hope you can help me out. I have been working really hard on a project and the deadline is fastly approaching.
I have used seperate bitmap layers to create different parts of my animation. I was finally done and ready to export my image sequences, but all of a sudden for some of my layers the frames have no content anymore. When I make a layer visible I can still see all my frames (as blue boxes) appear in the exact number I had them. However all frames appear empty. The animations I worked hard on appear to be gone.
I have no clue how this happened. If I had accidentally deleted a layer, the whole layer would be gone. If I deleted the frames, the frames would be gone. But both layer and frames are still there, just the content of the frames appear to be missing.
I’ve done many checks to see if this is a camera layer problem/maybe I toggled something to make them invisible, but so far nothing made them appear again. I did walk throught the recovery steps but when I access the folder with png images of my frames I see the contents for the layers I still have, but none of the other ones.
What caused this? And is ther any way to save my project?
All help is appreciated!
Sorry to hear about the issues you’ve encountered. Unfortunately there is not likely to be any other way to recover your information if you have gone through the steps in our recovery guide, which it sounds like you have. There have been problems in past versions of Pencil2D in particular with frames being wiped like you describe, but most of those seem to have been fixed by improvements in the latest version. The only file wipe cause I am aware of that still applies to v0.7.0 is under quite specific circumstances when copying and pasting frames on the timeline of a large project. This will be fixed in the next version of Pencil2D, but I honestly don’t recall any user reports of file wipes caused by this yet.
What I would recommend doing for future animations is first make sure you are using the latest version of Pencil2D. You can check your version by going to Help > About in the top menu, it should say that you are using 0.7.0 in the popup dialog. If it is lower than that version, please upgrade. Once you are up to date, the only other thing I can recommend to avoid this situation in the future is to make frequent backups of your project. The unfortunate reality is that projects on rare occasion become corrupted. While we try our best to make Pencil2D reliable, issues like this have proven challenging to reproduce or locate the cause of, and certain scenarios such as hardware issues or power outages will always remain a possible cause of corruption no matter what we do. By making copies of your project as you make progress, you can reduce the amount of work you risk losing in the case something goes wrong.