Corrupt document twice in a row

[david.g...@harpethhall.org]

I am a teacher, and I was planning to use 3DTin for a simple modeling project with some students - we have become frustrated with Tinkercad's slowness, and 3DTin seems in some ways even more easy to use, especially for the kind of work I want to do in my math class. I was trying to create some sample models for PVC pipes and pipe fittings so the girls could manipulate them to "construct" various objects.

I was working on the models, and I must have done something because suddenly the whole screen turned "white" - no grid, no objects. I quickly saved the file. then refreshed. Nothing. Then I tried to open it again, and it gave me a "Corrupt Document" error.

So I tried again, and just as I was finishing up my work, same problem.

I can't use 3DTin for this project (or future projects) if this instability continues, so any suggestions as to whether I'm doing something wrong?

The sketches in question are http://www.3dtin.com/sq6r and http://www.3dtin.com/765r , though even that was hard to find - since I can't get the sketch to load there is no Share option to see the URL. I had to use the Chrome element inspector inside the Open dialog and look at the address for the thumbnail preview to find the correct codes! Really, the address (or at least the coded part, like sq6r) should show up underneath the image preview in the Open and Account dialogs.

Sincerely,

David Griswold

[Jayesh Salvi]

Hi David,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.

I got a chance to look at both of your documents. It looks like the second document is working (765r). The first document is corrupt. I looked into that document and it seems to have invalid value for camera coordinates. Admittedly it's a bug in the application that generated such invalid values. But it was caused by some changes you might have done to the camera. If you recall what was that, you can avoid doing that to prevent hitting this error in future. I'll be curious to know if you remember anything specific that you did, because I haven't seen corrupt documents that often in 3DTin.

Hope this helps.

--
Jayesh

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[david.g...@harpethhall.org]

I don't remember what I was doing, honestly - I think I was just zooming out. Is there any way to fix it on my end  - perhaps just default it back to the home position  somehow? My biggest worry is that this will happen when my students are modeling, so if there's some way to recover their work that would calm my fears.

The second one worked, I think, because somehow a Chrome instance that had crashed on my laptop reopened the document automatically, and that somehow made it work again. It was definitely not working on my desktop when I made the post. So that's weird. Is there something sent by the browser that could somehow reset the camera coordinates and if so, is there some way we could harness that to save the other file? I admit to not really understanding HTML5 or WebGL enough to know anything about it.

Thanks,

David

[david.g...@harpethhall.org]

Just an update - I went ahead and jumped off the cliff and started the project using 3DTin. My students are modeling the soccer goals we will be building out of PVC next week.

I had three students get the same problem as I had here. It manifests as a "white screen of death" - the whole screen goes white and pushing the various camera buttons does nothing. There seems to be no way to fix the camera values once it has happened. It definitely happens while moving around and zooming in and out (probably in orthographic mode, since that works best for our needs), but there has been no clear method of recreating it. 

I have instructed the students that if it happens to refresh WITHOUT saving and to NOT recover their unsaved work. This sends them back to their last saved version which was, hopefully, soon before the white screen of death. So far, that seems an acceptable workaround, but it is obviously not ideal.

I find it surprising that this bug hasn't come up more often, since it has managed to come up four times in a three hour period doing very simple things, with different people, in my presence. Even if the bug cannot be locked down, I think some more graceful way of recovering from it should be implemented - if it has to do with invalid camera values, isn't there some way to force them back to something valid? Obviously, there may be more going on here than I understand, but it seems like this might be an important one to solve. I am contemplating purchasing a premium account for myself, and possibly looking into getting some sort of educational license for use at my school, but if this bug remains such a showstopper I don't really feel comfortable doing that.

I had another odd issue come up with a student too, which I will post about in another thread as it is not related to this one.