Control rig channels disappearing

#1

I thought I would make a post about this, as it’s not a very obvious thing. I’ve seen many people have controls on a display layer. If the display layer is turned to reference (“R” in the display layer next to the name of the layer), your channels will “disappear” from the channel box. It’s confusing, because they don’t disappear until you deselect a control you have active. I’ve seen many people (myself included the first time it happened) stumble around, trying to get the channels to show up again. I’ve even heard of people reinstalling Maya, which still doesn’t “fix” the problem.

Hopefully this thread is easily found in a search, if someone is pulling their hair out.

#2

Its not very obvious to me how to even reproduce this behaviour. I have controls on a display layer. I’ve set that layer to reference mode. Now I cant select my controls in the viewport (as expected). I can still select them in the outliner, and when I do their channels still show up in the channel box. The only way I can make them disappear is to use one of the attribute filters.

Is what you describe something that always happens for you, or just on rare occasions?

David

#3

This recently came up during a demo I was doing at a school running Maya 2013.

#4

That’s funny because that literally just happened to me the other day. For some reason on my rig the shape node was getting selected instead of the transform node. No idea why though. For the life of me I couldn’t replicate the problem, but it always happens with the control curves in my rig. I guess technically since it’s display layer is on reference it shouldn’t be selectable anyway, but it just gets confusing when you can still select the shape node (in my case it was in the layer by accident, so imagine the reaction I had when all my beautiful controls were gone :stuck_out_tongue: ). Again, no idea why or how this happens, but if it does happen to you Floyd is spot on :thumbsup:

Edit: found exact cause. If the nurbs curve has a drawing override to change the color, it does what Floyd was talking about. This always happens with a previously combined nurbs curve and most of the time with a normal nurbs curve. Sometimes it locks the drawing override settings on a normal nurbs curve.

#5

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