Maya saves wont open properly, Please help!

[nickziemer]

I have the text version of the file, if that will help anyone to figure it out, please let me know and I can email it to you. It says I am not allowed to post attachments in the forum yet.

[zoharl]

You could always try to get the vertex and connectivity data from the .ma.
Maybe you should attach the file, and we'll try to help you.

[nickziemer]

Ok it's letting me attach files now, but it says the files are too big to post. I will figure out some way to get the information to you guys. Thanks for taking the time to try and help me.

[nickziemer]

When I open the outliner there is other geometry but the icon next to them is a white paper with a red arrow, and I can't seem to find out what that icon represents. I have been messing around trying to figure out what is wrong with it, but nothing seems to work.

[WesHowe]

OK, I opened your file after unzipping it and renaming it to a .ma file. The texture files are missing, but I can see the geometry.

You have a lot of undeleted history. Before I deleted it, using Edit -> Delete All by Type -> Non-Deformer History, I got the same error you cited when trying to play the animation. After deleting the history, the animation plays. When playing it I see significant happening.

There are a lot of transform nodes in there that have no shape nodes, probably the result of Mesh -> Combine. You could probably work at cleaning this up a bit.

But the biggest issue is undeleted history nodes.

<* Wes *>

[nickziemer]

Thanks for checking it out, I went in and deleted the history like you said, but I can still only see the unmodeled arms. were you able to see the torso,legs, and arms? is there something I am doing wrong?

[WesHowe]

No, no torso, legs or arms, I don't think they are in there. There are some transforms that have no shape nodes, but they are not labeled as arms or legs or torso.

It would be impossible for me to know what happened, absent looking over your shoulder while you worked. One thing that has bit me is that almost everything you click and nearly any key you press can do something, and the change is not always visible. It is easy to click and drag slightly, sometimes selecting a vertex that was not intended (maybe one on the far side). Move that vertex and the other will move, too. One way too common problem you see is users that accidentally bump the 'b' key, throwing them into soft-selection mode. Until you get used to watching what you do carefully, lots of stuff happens.

One thing I use is the Heads Up Display in the Display menu. That will display vertex and poly counts, as well as the number selected. I look at it a lot to make sure there is only one vertex selected before I perform an operation (or whatever number is appropriate). And I mostly work with the Outliner visible.

Another thing that works well is Autosave. If you had that turned on, you could probably find an older copy of your file that still had those items in there, and import them back in. Maybe you do have Autosave turned on, it is in preferences, and you can look through the files it saved. If nothing else, you can copy and paste each item... I don't know how powerful your computer is, but you can usually run two copies of Maya at once. The second copy you run will complain that the CommandPort was in use, but unless you are doing sophisticated stuff interfacing other programs to Maya, that is no problem. If you find an old file, select each item in it, press ctrl-c, activate the other copy and press ctrl-v.

<* Wes *>

[nickziemer]

Thanks for all your help Wes, I will keep all of those things in mind. This is the first character I have ever modeled so I can use all the tips and help. Lesson learned haha.

[jtilden20]

One thing to look for in the ASCII would be either of these strings:
1.#QNAN
1.#IND

Sometimes, more when working at smaller scales (<1m = 1cm), maya will save ascii files with the bunk strings in it. When it tries to later read the file, it simple thinks its a syntax error and falls over.

While I have never been able to produce a reliable repro case, I have figured out an easy solution: simply replace the 1.#QNAN and 1.#IND with Zero.

As far as I've been able to determine, it seems like it only does this when the value is extremely insignificant. Hope this helps!

[zoharl]

Your attachments disappeared. Let me have a look at it. You can sign up for free to google docs, and upload stuff to there.

[WesHowe]

He must have removed his files.

I had no warning or errors opening them, but there was undeleted history and some items he had made were no where to be found (just transforms with no shape node). It was a good reminder to everyone to check your Autosave settings.

<* Wes *>

[zoharl]

Did you try to edit the file with notepad, and see if there is an unrelated vertex / face info that is not related to the objects in the scene, and might be the lost data?

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