This happened to me a long time ago while using maya 8 and was hoping that it would never come back again, but here it is…

I create a simple character rig, in this instance I made a waving flag using ncloth, did a Geometry Cache of the simulation and connected a Time attribute on my main control handle to the geoCache time attribute so I could control the speed of the animation. Then cleaned up the scene, killed history and made sure all my nodes were prefixed.

I reference one flag into a new file, animate the Time attribute, everything is fine.
I reference the same flag again into the same file, animate that flag’s Time attribute, things are fine still until…

I save the file and open it again. Now one flag’s Time attribute works fine driving the geoCache, but the other flag’s Time attribute doesn’t work because it’s been overridden by the other flag. So now both flags are playing only one flag’s animation.
I replace the bad flag’s reference with the flag file and things seem to work until I save the scene. On opening the problem comes back.
If I import the references the problem is still there, looking at the in out connections in the hypergraph don’t reveal any cross liking of attributes.

When I had this problem before was using plain old blendshapes and even lattices.
Has anyone encountered such problem and found a solution?

Thank you.

	Attachment
flag_2.zip

It sounds like maybe you used the same prefix name when you referenced the flag the second time. More recent versions of Mays want to use the file name as the prefix and will add a number to it to try to make it unique.

At any rate, I know this works with Maya 2011 because I have had 12 instances of the same character in a scene, all independently animated.

<* Wes *>

I should have looked at this in more detail before my previous post, I left a detail out, but I was being lazy because that file is very big (it actually has 7 different characters each referenced multiple times, 63 total animated characters).

What I used was a namespace plus the option “resolve all nodes with” + “this string” (instead of the filename). I used “cb” for the string (just something short), and each additional time I referenced a file, Maya added a digit or digits to it. Thus I have characters that are prefixed “cb:”, “cb1:”, “cb2:” ... “cb62:”. I think that the filename option is the recommended method, but that wasn’t what I used, and I don’t remember if that was by accident or on purpose.

The animation keys use the same prefix as the object they are set on, so all the animations work independently. Many, but not all, of the different characters share joint names (obviously, the ones that reference the same file all have the same skeleton). But the prefix + digits makes the final naming unique, so it all works.

You should be able to edit the prefix for the second flag in the reference editor, and then reload it, but if the keys are lost then I don’t know if you can save the second flag animation. While I have rescued keys before by renaming them using the Comet Rename plug-in, if they all have the same resolved name then that may not be possible in your case, I don’t know.

<* Wes *>

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