I dealt with this issue quite heavily while working on wildstar. Mostly occurred in Softimage 7.5, but did experience a few in 2013 SP1.
In our case, having undo level reset to zero meant there was a corruption somewhere in the user's default profile under C:\users\<username>\Autodesk\Softimage_xxx. Renaming this folder and forcing Softimage to generate a new profile resolved the problem. After extensive digging into the problem and handling nearly a hundred cases, I tracked down the cause to faulty manipulation of the user preferences file (.prefs). Some tool(s) inside of Softimage corrupt this file and upon next restart of the application Softimage would not be able to parse it correctly inducing a lot of flakey behavior including crashing, file corruption, and resetting undo level to zero. Undo level at zero was a symptom, not the cause/problem. We didn't have any tools that reset the undo levels, but a few native Softimage tools do. Upon inspecting the .prefs files for affected users, the common thread I noticed is they each had tons of parameter values set in the file. By default this file is very sparse, but users migrating from one version of Softimage to another via the migration tool were the most common victims as the migrate tool would set an explicit value for every preference parameter in the migrated .prefs file causing it to become horribly bloated. Manually deleting data from the .prefs file was not a solution and often cause more problems. Replacing the .prefs file from another user profile was also not a solution as there are hidden backups and ties to other files in the profile that work together, hence why you rename your user profile and let Softimage generate a new one for you. In short, nipping and tucking worked in the short term, but within a month the user would be back at my desk with the same problem all over again. Animators were affected most by this problem. On a few occasions I witnessed it happening first hand. The victims typically relied heavily on workflows that performed many operations then followed them up with several consecutive undo operations, then rinse and repeat. If a crash occurred in that sequence (or scene saved in middle of such as sequence, such as with auto-save), the scene would get corrupted as well as the .prefs file, or more accurately, the hidden backup of the .prefs file. And this would trickle and propagate throughout the user's profile until it became a bigger problem, usually days later when the user couldn't work anymore. My suggestion is to rename your user profile folder and let Softimage generate a fresh one upon next restart. Then go into the user preferences and manually set the parameter values you like - and only those parameters. If you so much as change a parameter value in the preferences, even if you undo it later, it will be recorded in your .prefs file. So only touch those you need to touch. Do not use the migrate tool or other conveniences as that will only infect your fresh profile with data from the bad profile (behavior won't show up immediately, but it will eventually show up). Same rule applies for toolbars, layouts, and other customizations. for plugins/scripts, do not install them on toolbars as commands/buttons. Learn to make them into self-installing plugins and put them in an appropriate workgroup and menus. Matt Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2016 14:49:59 -0000 From: "adrian wyer" <adrian.w...@fluid-pictures.com> Subject: 0 undo levels we have a random issue where occasionally a session will start with undo levels set to zero anyone seen this, and more importantly, stopped it from happening!? 2015 x64 a Adrian Wyer Fluid Pictures 75-77 Margaret St. London W1W 8SY ++44(0) 207 580 0829 ------ Softimage Mailing List. To unsubscribe, send a mail to softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm.
