Illustrate animation issues - broken files

[TomM]

Hi.

The more I use this piece of...software the more frustrated I become.

Here's a link to part of the issues I'm having - apparently unsolved since 2016:

https://community.ptc.com/t5/Addtl-Creo-Products-View-Sketch/Creo-Illustrate-animation-annotations-grayed-out/m-p/172300#M791

Below is what I see in my file. But my issues go beyond what has been described in post above.

Here's the deal:

Those grayed out notes and symbols are gone from "Figure Content". No idea why though. 

I have several animations in a sequence plus some illustrations in one c3di file. Everything was working fine untill at one point I saved the file and opened it (I didn't even touch animations today, they were made yesterday). I was using symbols and callouts that I previously used in the sequence animations. After I opened Illustrate half the symbols/notes were gone from my freshly done illustration set. Not from the Figure Content though. However the figure content looks like that:

The top SS shows a right-click menu of a properly working callout/symbol. The bottom one shows a broken one.

Then I discovered the above described behaviour in sequences.

When I removed all animations from c3di file it didn't help me much. However when I inserted the "gone" or "broken" symbols in illustrations afterwards, saved and reopened the c3di file I was welcomed with double the set of them - meaning the broken symbols reappeared and started behaving properly again.

So I have a question - what the hell? Is this pricy software supposed to work only with small assemblies, without its core functions being used because they break the whole file and basically be a Paint on stereoids? Those were just simple sequences 2,5 minutes long, nothing fancy. Basically a test of the software.

I have no idea what breaks it, but my best guess is either sequence change - meaning moving the animations in sequence around/swapping them - or reversing them. Or...maybe those broken symbols and notes were the ones which had position markups - now that I think of it this might be the case cause if I remember correctly the symbols which never moved in animation did not freak out.

And no - I can't supply the file cause of IP, sadly.

[VladimirN]

@agarland Please take a look.

[agarland]

Tracks in the timeline will become 'greyed out' when the elements they are referencing (ie; parts or symbols etc) are missing.

So the first thing to do is check your symbols library and callout templates to see if anything has been deleted or updated.

If nothing is missing or been edited then I would again suggest you contact tech support and log a case so we can investigate the cause properly.

[TomM · Accepted solution]

I am not entirely sure yet but it seems that Recovery file save breaks a multitude of things in c3di files. Since I disabled it I have not experienced any issues except for a single crash. We'll see throughout the week and when I get back to creating animated assemblies...

Options -> Global -> General -> Recovery