I’ve been working with both CC4 and CC5, though I’ve only edited a very small number of characters in CC5 so far. However, I just noticed a problem affecting several of my CC4 projects. For instance, I have Susan character (from Reallusion’s content store) that I saved to my hard drive earlier this year. At that time, I hadn’t yet updated to the latest version of CC4 (It should be v4.64 the one I was using that time ).

Then, a couple of months later, I opened it now using the most recent version of CC4 (the one I currently have installed v4.66.5009.1). I changed her outfit and saved the file again. A prompt appeared asking if I wanted to generate an automatic backup before overwriting, so I now have two versions of Susan: the previous one and the current one. Today, when I tried to open the latest version of Susan in CC5 (v5.06.1410.1), I received the following message: “Failed to load the file. This file is not compatible with the application; please update your program to the newest version by selecting Check for Update in the Help menu.” Yet, I most certainly have the latest version of CC5 installed (I even reinstalled it, but the same happened).

Curiously, however, when I load the older version of Susan in CC5, there are no issues. This is happening with practically all of my characters: those saved using the current version of CC4 trigger the same error message with CC5, whereas those saved with the previous version are loaded without any problems.

I did find a workaround for this: I load the character in the newest version of CC4, send it to iClone, and then select the option to edit it in Character Creator. Since I have both CC versions installed, this sends the character to CC5, where it uploads without any issues—even though CC5 cannot load the character directly from the original CC4 project file. The downside to this workaround, however, is that any morphs that haven’t been baked are subsequently lost.

Why is this happening? Is there any way to fix it?