Hey there, I’m working on a shot right now and in it I have a background (which is just a grid) falling over onto the stage. I animated the grid falling and everything worked fine. I decided to add some detail to the grid and give it some supports in the back to make it look like what a real background could look like (instead of it just being a flat grid). I think adding those details is what screwed this up because now whenever I select the grid it has 0 keyframes on it, but it still animates and does what I keyframed however long ago I animated it. Its origin is also back at the origin of the scene now (no idea why)…

This wouldn’t be a problem normally but I want to tweak the animation on it now and I don’t have any way of doing that without redoing the animation. That probably isn’t a problem either seeing as it wasn’t very difficult to do, but I would still like to try and figure out what the problem is and try to fix it (maybe for future reference)…

Thanks in advance!

EDIT… Oh and I forgot to mention… The grid also deforms now. It doesn’t stay as a flat box (like it should), it now bends towards the middle. Again… no idea why…

Hi welcome liquidsoap89 , i try to reproduce the situation but for me still see the keyframes.
in the keyframe bar and in the GraphEditor,.., is rare.
when you select you have selected the gridshape? or the grid?
try to force select in the hypergraph nodes,
or if you want share a file example and i check for you

all the best.

Lead Character Shading in Main’s Characters, on Mental Ray & Arnold Render.
for the feature film “Metegol”, directed by Juan J. Campanella,
Oscar award winner for the best foreign language film “El secreto de sus ojos”

I’ve tried selecting the grid in the scene, in the explorer and I just tried selecting it in the Hypergraph Hierarchy and none of it worked. I’m assuming this whole thing was caused when I modified the grid because it starts to deform on the edge loop where I changed the geometry… but I’m not really sure what causes something like that to happen or why.

I can try and send you the file, but right now I’m referencing the scene from another file. I do all the modelling in the scene being referenced, and I do all the animation in the scene that is actually referencing. If you could let me know what I need to send in order for it to work for you that would be great (if I need to send anything different at all).

Thanks again.

It sounds like you’ve been grouping stuff that shouldn’t have been grouped.

Anyway, the first thing you need to do is figure out where your animated transforms are. Here’s a bit of MEL that will help you find all nodes that have animated rotation.

if you want to find objects that have animated translations, change animCurveTA to animCurveTL.

After running this, you should be able to see the selected objects in the Outliner, by running Display > Reveal Selected.

Now you should have found the animated transforms. If there’s nothing there you did something rather unusual and I’d very much like to see the file if that’s indeed the case.

The other problem you’re seeing is probably coming from parenting objects and applying transformations to the transforms without considering the effects that cumulative transforms have in a hierarchy. Scaling something then rotating its children and then translating the children of the rotated node can have dramatically different effects than doing translation first, then rotating and translating last and may result in very odd-looking shapes.

Okay so I tried the mel code you sent me, and it selected everything that had animated rotations except the grid…

To be honest, I have no idea what you’re talking about with that second possibility for the problem you have there. That went right over my head :).

I know that the grid isn’t parented to anything (that I know of) and I don’t think its grouped with anything either. I’ve got it in a layer so that I can turn off the visibilty for the environment, but other than that I think it’s all by itself.

Is there a way that I can take the whole scene that is referencing and somehow like… freeze the geometry into that scene or something? I just tried opening the file on another computer and obviously everything being referenced (which is almost everything) was not there. So is there a way to build all the referenced stuff into the scene so it isn’t referenced anymore (and still keeping its animation) so that I can send you the file?

Sorry for all the questions, I’m just really curious as to what’s causing this.

Post the scene somewhere or email it to me, and I’ll tell you what’s wrong.

i think is better is you can share the file or example.
i create a grid, animated put a deformer( non linear deformer ) and add of stuff modification in the object later. and i still see the curves and key…
maybe re-import the escene?
in a past maya make me this, selecting the shape and not the object and in this case you not see the curves and key’s

if you select in the hypergraph you can’t see the keys?  are realy like to see this :S

Lead Character Shading in Main’s Characters, on Mental Ray & Arnold Render.
for the feature film “Metegol”, directed by Juan J. Campanella,
Oscar award winner for the best foreign language film “El secreto de sus ojos”

I’m not able to post the file here because it can’t reference the file that has all the objects in it. I tried opening the file that I have been animating in on another computer, and then tried referencing the file it normally references again, but nothing had any animation on it. It only seems to reference on the main computer I work on.

If there’s something I can do to allow me to send you the whole file with the objects AND the animation I’ll do that and hopefully you guys can find a solution.

liquidsoap89
maybe you have locked the reference? , if you lock in Refence Editor… not shows the keys ...
Reference Editor + Reference + Lock Reference......

Lead Character Shading in Main’s Characters, on Mental Ray & Arnold Render.
for the feature film “Metegol”, directed by Juan J. Campanella,
Oscar award winner for the best foreign language film “El secreto de sus ojos”

No I checked to see if it was locked already (and it wasn’t). Everything else in that reference file that has animation still works just fine…

Do you know of a way that I can send you this file? I tried just opening it somewhere else and it obviously didn’t work, and I tried re-referencing the other file which worked, but it didn’t have any animation. So is there a way to send you the whole file with the animation somehow?

Nailed it! I’ve got the referenced scenes in the same file now. I’ll post it for you guys to take a look at now.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/goxg6q