Broken Saved 3D Projection Views in Navigator

[Da3dalus]

I think this is a bug, but I'm not sure...

We have a large model of an existing 14-story building that we've been working on for a long time. We do various small renovations for the Owner, and it's nice to keep it all in one place. Since we do a lot of interior renderings of small vignette areas, we keep saved 3D views along with the CD views for reference. It's nice to be able to re-create views of former projects so we can show them what we did before.

Well, recently we were trying to bring up some of those views, and the camera locations have moved off into never-never land. You can't even see the building. I can go into 3D Projection Settings and move back to the right location (using shift- and alt-click), and all of the other attributes of the view (Z-elevation, layers, model view, marquee, etc.) are still correct. However, that's dozens of views of which we had carefully placed the viewpoint, now they're lost.

My designers did say they had a hiccup a couple of weeks ago, where the file crashed and didn't want to open until they restarted their computers. We went to a backup from a couple of months ago, which is OK. But it doesn't have any of the changes we've made since then. The model seems otherwise intact.

Questions:
1. Any idea how this happened? Is this common during a crash? Any way to avoid it?
2. The X and Y coordinates of the Saved Views are the only things that are broken. Is there any way to edit these directly? Maybe I can discover a consistent error that can be corrected (perhaps they all moved 1,000,000 feet up and to the left).
3. Is there a way to copy the old views into the new file?

Thank you all!

[Anonymous]

i had the same happen to me yesterday. restarted computer after a crash and opened the project file; all seems fine and don't appear to have lost any information (had done a recent save) however all the saved 3d window views seem to have lost/scrambled the camera co-ordinates.

[David Maudlin]

Da3dalus wrote:
3. Is there a way to copy the old views into the new file

Chuck:

You may already know this but: cameras can be copied between ArchiCAD files (copy/paste). If the views are not linked to cameras, you can use the "Insert a new cameras after the selected one" command (this is part of the Animation Controls menu item) to place them in the old file, and then copy to the current file. The view settings for these cameras will need to be reestablished, but at least you will have the correct views of the model.

HTH

David