This morning brought quite a scare as I picked up a new shot to light. It had a similar setup to one I had done early last week, I copied the file and used it as a starting place. After loading the thing up, I realized something wasn’t right. The cache’d out character geometry wasn’t in the right place. It wasn’t moving as I scrolled through the timeline! About two seconds later, panic set in as I wondered if what I did yesterday (mass fix of some 29 shots) backfired and corrupted all of those shots. It only got worse as I realized that I didn’t do a backup (stupid, stupid mistake) prior to running that mass fix.
Sure enough, all of those shots were screwed up. I started to get hot and uncomfortable while wondering how many months of work I had just thrown out the window. I’m now thinking that I could be working through Summer just to get back to where I was yesterday. After an hour or two of debugging exactly what went wrong, I realized that a fix wasn’t very easy. Maya wasn’t allowing me to edit the jiggle deformer (this is holding the geometry cache) for some reason. I couldn’t change it in the Ascii file or through mel commands at the command prompt. After a lot of trial and error, I figured out a work around and wrote another script to fix it and prepared to mass run it on those 29 files.
Maya was acting a little sluggish, so I restarted and loaded in one of the files again to give it one last test before running the new script. After it came up, the geometry cache was fine. Everything was working. What went wrong? I still have no idea. Although I spent a couple of hours debugging an issue that wasn’t even an issue, I was happy to learn that my original script wasn’t poorly written. It was just some weird Maya thing all along that made something out of nothing.
Posted in TDDUP-Production Log
Hey Rick,
How’s that jiggle deformer/point cache workflow working out for you? Apart from the phantom errors, I mean. Heh. Really, have you found it to be particularly helpful/sueful or did it end up being a lot of work without a lot of payoff? I developed a similar system a while back thinking it’d be great, but then after messing with it and thinking about it I realzied I wa sjust kinda letting the TD side of me geek out a bit too much. I ultimately decided that – though it’s cool- for my little projects I couldn;t justify using it. I’m just wondering if I missed out on something. :)
-k
Hi Keith. Honestly, the only reason I’m using the jiggle deformer is because I have to. At least, I have to on one of my characters. If I don’t, the character’s hair shimmers on the geometry as it moves. Since this is just a personal project, I wouldn’t of used the jiggle cache at all if I didn’t have this shimmering problem.
In that case one does what one must. Heh.
-k