Error can't rename file xxxx~yyyy.png to yyyy.png

[cakeller]

Every time the artwork is regenerated at 200% I get an error saying can't rename file. See the attached error log.

Is there any way to sanitize this file without starting over?

at this point I think it's fixed - what I did was

1) I pushed all behaviors from the puppets to default
2) I exported the puppets
3) I created a new project and imported all the puppets
4) imported the offending project
5) swapped the offending scene's puppets for the newly imported puppets
6) deleted the old puppets and did a save-as.
7) on opening up the newly saved-as project no more error.

I did build the project in the beta version of Ch, so perhaps something got corrupted. I occurred at the time when I was bumping up the ai render res. I bumped it to 400% and realized that was WAY too laggy, and so I bumped it back down to 200%. However perhaps I was not patient enough or something. I ended up with files that couldn't be "renamed" how shown in the log.

Anyway... this feels like a bug. But I can't exactly repeat it. If you guys want the file, I'm happy to share by uploading.

[dtull-adobe]

What kind of volume is the D drive? Those errors would suggest errors accessing the drive or an indexer or other app competing with Character Animator accessing the just written files.

Dan Tull

[cakeller]

It’s just a hard drive, doesn’t matter where the file is. And though I thought I had it fixed, I opened it again and alt-clicked the refresh on the scene and the error message came up again.

I’m pretty sure it’s a conflicted object in the file from when I changed the render %. Because that’s when this error started and it only happens at 200%

Not 50,100, or 400%

And it’s always the same character

[cakeller]

OK I just looked again...
looks like the file is somehow already there, and so the other file cannot be renamed to be the same name as a file that is already there.

so file x~y.png can't be renamed to x.png
probably because there's already a file named x.png

why it's creating that x.png I don't know.

[dtull-adobe]

I have a theory on what is happening here. The rendering of the PNG textures used by the scene panel is done asynchronously. If two layers are identical, it will re-use textures and will skip rendering if a given texture is already there. However, while populating that cache, there is a window of opportunity where it can get 2 (or more) renders in flight that have the same destination path before either has written its output. In that case, the latter will fail. The failure should be harmless because the names being the same implies they are identical at a pixel level, but it is a bug that it can happen that way.

Thanks for reporting it! I think I'll be able to reproduce this based on my investigation, but if not I may come back to ask for the puppet artwork to see if I can confirm that way.

Thanks!
Dan Tull

[cakeller]

That’s a very interesting idea and it’s actually not far fetched. I reused some mouth shapes in illustrator. And the other layer, I think there may have been a duplicate copy of that object too.

Luckily I do my backups ans have several project copies where I have this problem. I’ll ale. Look and see which layers and see if I can cure it by making changes to uniquify the layers.

At any rate this definitely gives me also something to further experiment with.

Let me know if you want the corrupted project / puppet

[dtull-adobe]

I tried a few schemes to cause a collision of this sort and so far didn't manage to produce an actual collision. It turns out that a lot more than just layer content needs to match for it to collide.

I did file a bug, though, and I think we can work out the right case and fix it.

DT