I intended to spend my time today working on scaling my character rig into my tracked scene, but unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, spent most of my work day navigating horrifying errors that threatened to erase the work I’d done on this project throughout the term.
Ready to scale my rig, I downloaded all of the necessary (and expensive) files from turbosquid and moved them into the appropriate folders, then dragged the character into my Maya scene.
Immediately upon doing so, I was met with this notification:
I believed this to be due to the fact that the rig utilizes the shave and a haircut plugin and I was attempting to launch Maya 2018 without launching the plugin first. I decided to go ahead with scaling, planning to only open shave and a haircut when I was ready to render out my scene. I applied texture to the rig, then hit the keyboard shortcut cmd + s to save my file. Immediately upon doing so, Maya crashed.
When I went to re-open my scene, I found the file corrupted.
I tried deleting the character rig and all assets related to it, but unfortunately, I found that my scene was still ruined. The geo was completely corrupted; when I tried to look through the camera lens I could only see this.
It appeared that almost all of the assets in my scene had changed and would require reworking. However, I did find this new file in my scenes folder, which, according to Luke, was a temporary file saved by the software in the event of a crash.
Dragging it into Maya, I found that my scene opened perfectly, and decided to call off my heart attack.
For a little while, though, I was confused as to why I could not save this file as a regular Maya file, and was nervous that I had perhaps lost all of my work from the term after all.
Thankfully, I found a simple answer: it was an error with my naming convention. Maya believed I was trying to save the file as a “.01” file, solved when I switched to “v1” and “v2”.
I’d grown used to using “.01” in my 3DE work.
I’ve tried a couple of times, now, to save the scene (incrementally) with the character rig in it, and am met with a crash each time. My leading theory is that it has to do with the shave and a haircut data; I need to open the program with the shave and a haircut plugin installed in order to avoid data loss. Tomorrow morning I will review my one-to-one with Luke in which we discussed using the plugin and give it another try.