// Warning: Cycle on 'IkhLeftLegendPoint.translateX' may not evaluate as expected. (

#1

Has anyone seen this before:

// Warning: Cycle on ‘IkhLeftLegendPoint.translateX’ may not evaluate as expected. (Use ‘cycleCheck -e off’ to disable this warning.) //

I am having what I think is a graphics card interface problem with Maya. I think this mainly because I don’t have an issue when I open the file on my laptop.
My Grpahics card is an ATI Radeon 4600 Series and I’m using Maya 2011. This is a new issue, I’ve since updated my card driver, still no change.

What’s happening on my biped rig, when I slide the peel heel attribute, she’s supposed to point her toe, but instead the whole foot pops out of it’s IK control. When I click a display layer, doesn’t matter which one, it snaps into place and looks like it should. When I slide the attribute back to 0 the whole foot moves back into it’s control but with the heel still peeled. Again if I click the display layer on and off, or chose a different attribute it moves back into place.

Any thoughts on how to fix it? Either in Maya or through the card, or am I just s.o.l. and have to deal with it?

Again I can open the same file on my laptop with an Nvida card and it’s just fine. I’m not even sure that warning above is related, as I tried googling it and came up with nothing.

#2

Yes, I’ve seen these type or warnings before.
I would be very surprised if it has anything to do with your graphics card. However I cannot explain why your file opens ok on the laptop. Are you sure you can move that ik handle around without getting more of these errors?

A “cycle” is when you have a loop in the node network. Like if you constrain the ik handle to something that already effects the ik handle. There are many possibilities though. Sometimes maya is ok with it and the warning is just suggesting that you can disable the error check to improve performance by not printing all those warning messages. For example, motion path flow animation can cause a warning when the cycle is actually not a problem.
However, whenever I have seen this warning with an ik handle it amost always is a problem and you need to figure out what is causing it so you can break the cycle. Otherwise your animation may not render as you expect, or you could get serious memory issues. Often it means “undo” behaves in unpredictable ways which can make the scene hard to work with.

If you can post a scene, then maybe someone can figure out where the problem lies.

David

#3

As David suggests, cycles have absolutely nothing to do with the graphics card and can be harmless, but more often than not give you some nasty results which are hard, sometimes impossible to work around during animation. Maybe you disabled the warning on the laptop so it does not show there, when you open the file?!?

   Basically you really should find out whatever it is that is controlling the IK handle, which obviously in turn is controlled by that same ik-handle directly or indirectly. I'd start by examining the hierarchy closely, then continue looking for constraints that might be causing the issue. 
   
   These things usually happen to me when I am a tad careless in my setups and/or did not plan them out carefully. To give you an idea what to look for, the latest case I had was a hand IK-handle (not arm), attached from the fk-wrist to the middle fk-metacarpal joint of the fk-hand causing a cycle because I parent-constrained the metacarpal joint to an sdk-offset group, which I parented to  another control curve, which in turn was parented to the fk-wrist control, which in turn obviously controls the wrist, hence causing a cyclic warning.
   
   These things happen and can be difficult and frustrating to track down, but tenacity to solve the issue usually pays off.
   
   Keep us posted!
   
   Cheers!
#4

Except I’ve been working with these rigs for a while now, and this is a recent problem. It began in a scene that had a motion path but now that same error message is appearing in the referenced files. Even in unrelated and much older files that were working fine a month ago and have not been edited.

The reason I had thought that maybe it was this computer was because when I open on my laptop, and I use the peel heel attribute it operates normally but if I take that same file and use the peel heel attribute it pops out of its controller like someone doing the hokey poky.

I’ve googeled LegendPoint but the only thing that comes up is my search.

#5

its called a cyclical error go in hypergraph hierarchy and look for two objects with connections (constraints probably) to the same joint for example.

#6

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