We are students working on a group project using Maya 6. It involves an intricate landscape and quite a few characters. We were advised by our lecturer that it would be best to create references for these elements within the different scenes of our animation. This would apparently speed up the files and enable us to make changes to the characters etc. and these would then update in all the scenes. He advised that all the scenes as well as all the reference files should be in one folder. However we have had many unexpected problems and inconsistent results within the scenes.
Often characters' positions would change drastically or they would return to the origin, animation would be lost, props would fall apart, etc. Importing clips onto characters has also been problematic, and some camera movements have changed. These problems only occurred in certain scenes however. When opening the scenes we get error messages and they also take EXTREMELY long to open.
Can anyone PLEASE advise us?
Circences Students :eek:
Referenced files will indeed take a while to open...since you are pulling files from all over the place. In the case of props or even characters snapping back to the orgin that could be an issue regarding the cleanup of the model or data from the reference. You could also place a keyframe at frame 1 and that should solve any characters from moving around drastically.
Your instructor also was probably implying that refrencing will speed up files in the sense that someone could be animating while another is fixing the model of the referenced character in its original location. You should also save as .ma files. If you are getting files that are dropping animation then it could either be corrupted or you changed something on the rig. Saving as .ma files if you have a friend who is talented in scripting mel then he or she could actually go right in there and physically fix the problem from the source by opening the maya ascii file in a word document or what not.
Hope some of this helps.
www.robtmiller.com
Animator
Neversoft Entertainment
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Thank you for your reply. Yes your comments have been most helpful!
Do you think that referencing is the way to go? Or should we rather try importing? We have a time limit and can't afford to spend weeks trying to fix files.
referencing is absolutely. positively, 100% the way to go. If you want to make a global change to a prop or character, you only change the master file and it effects the references in all the other files. You can also be animating on a somewhat unfinished rig with referencing. If you imported it you're stuck with whatever rig you had when you imported. The problem with things snapping back to origin is exactly what Rob said. If you don't have a key on every single thing you changed in the file, the reference will reload to whatever the value was set to in the original reference, usually origin.
I haven't imported something into a animation scene in over a year. I reference *everything*. I even nest references, which is completely do-able.