Hello,
I am currently working on an animated shortfilm and there seems to be a problem with Maya, using referenced character rigs (with character sets), when saving the animation.
After reloading the scene all animation keys seem to be away, NO ANIMATION at all, the character just remains in the pose last seen before saving. Even in the auto- and incremental-saves.
I had this problem before, a few weeks ago, there I realized that I accidently had used Maya’s animation layers which (as someone told me) may cause problems, especially in conjunction with character sets. I fortunately could restore the animation since the information was still inside the code my .ma-File where it could be reconnected and killed the animation layer.
But now I am having the same problem again without any animation layer.

Has anybody else had such problems? Or knows what it could be? I really would appreciate your hints or ideas for solving this issue. It’s no fun animating when you can’t even rely on autosaves and all anymore and days of work are lost with no visible reason.

I am using Maya 2011 64x!
I added the .ma-file as an attachment:

Ok, here is some information I found in the web about the issue. Seems to be one of the mysteries of Maya :)

http://markj3d.blogspot.com/2011/07/lost-animation-when-loading-referenced.html

I ran into this issue the first of this month and Mark’s blog saved the day.  Sadly I’m hitting the issue again, though in a slightly different form.  This time it’s definitely related to animation layers.  Is referencing + character sets + animation layers really a combination that should be avoided?  That’s depressing if so.  The thing that throws me about this particular case is that after the scene fails to load properly it shows zero edits made to the reference.  If you save after that you lose all the data.

My current theory is that one early reference edit on the character set during load is erroring, in turn causing all additional edits to fail.  Since they failed to load they’re not there to save.  For example, the other day I had a node with an attribute which I meant to lock, but didn’t.  The animators tweaked some data on the node (including this attribute), I then caught the error and locked the attribute in the reference file.  I assumed this was a good way to ensure the bad reference edits didn’t override what I wanted to be a constant value.  However, on scene load Maya would attempt to set the value and fail, then all other attributes that were modified on that node failed to load as well.  That seems pretty flawed to me.  Failing to set one attribute on a node should cause all other attributes to fail.  Regardless though, shouldn’t that show up in the referenced edit’s window under the failed section?  Instead it’s empty.

I’m kind of babbling here, but the end result is I have animators asking me to get animations back.  They’ll let one or two, “Sorry I’m not sure what to do here” slide, but the more they’re hitting these bugs the more nervous we’re all getting.  Bugs where things act weird or cause the app to crash...I think we all know how to deal with those, but data loss is one that can keep you up at night.  I mean literally staying up all night trying to salvage it :)

The fact you have no connection / refEdits in your list is the symptom of all of this. Which version of Maya are you on? There was a bug back in the earlier versions of 2011 where using cSets and Layers would actually disconnect the nodes from the characterSet the minute you keyed a layer. Think it was fixed in Hotfix4 onwards (don’t quote me on that).

That said what you’ve got is the exact same thing, you animate, continue to save all day completely unaware that sometime in the day the refEdits that connect the animationCurves up failed and you’ve been saving duff data all day. The fix on my blog should still fix this, unless it is indeed the Layer/cSet bug mentioned. The error is still in the mayaAscii saver, or so we think. 2012 SP should, I say should have fixed this....we’ve not had it for a while but that’s not to say the animators aren’t just using the one button fix in our pipeline and not telling us.

Mark

Lead Technical Supervisor
Eurocom Entertainment
http://www.Eurocom.co.uk
http://markj3d.blogspot.com/
Author: Autodesk Masterclass 2011 - Live Animation Binding
http://area.autodesk.com/siggraph2011/masterclasses/class2