How in the hell? I can’t rename these nodes as maya fails because there are multiple objects with the same dag. Im sure I should send this to autodesk, but I doubt i could get a repro case that I was allowed to send in. Anyhow, thought I would share
Hahaha! Reminds me when I used to part-time teach Maya to programming students at my uni. While nothing that serious, I never figured out how they managed to destroy scenes so badly and with such speed! It was truly an amazing sight. :’)
(Don’t worry - they got better!)
That’s pretty impressive. I don’t know how something like that could happen. If it’s possible to change a dag node ID in the API
I could see something like this happen, but from there you probably couldn’t go back.
Also I know when you instance an object it gets it’s own dag, but maybe doing something like this from code could make this happen,
or even somehow re-importing the same objects from the same scene (BUG?)? I’m just throwing some ideas up there. HA
Also I quickly looked it up and found this which is pretty funny and probably useless.
Maya allows duplicate dag paths?
-Nick
Name issues like this seem to arise from external references and namespaces (and oddities surrounding those). Have these files had external references?
they had a single reference and then temporary imports with namespaces. I’ll need to see why the numbering got so out of whack though
Any time I have trouble renaming objects in a scene like this it has to do with namespaces.
The numbering on your objects, though, give me the heeby-jeebies. When I see stuff like that I tend to back away slowly, close down the scene, and restart from the last known good version.
I’ve seen this issue quite a lot. My understanding of what is happening under the hood is this, others may be able to confirm/amend this:
Maya attempts to keep names unique within the same namespace, but it also attempts to truncate names down to the character limit; however, under the hood Maya does it’s unique name testing against a string that may be much longer than the limit. Thus, it’s possible that the longer name was generated to be unique, but then was subsequently truncated down and became non-unique again.
Obviously this causes all kinds of chaos. Not the least of which is that most of the commands engine runs off of string names. So, targeting nodes for many basic commands, like a rename, will break if it finds more than one possible node at that string path.
Fortunately, you can bypass the commands engine and use the api to rename nodes and it’ll work fine. You may also consider using letters instead of numbers for your incremental ID, as Maya handles numbers at the end of a name differently than letters and can be more susceptible to problems. Plus a base 52 letter system(lower and upper ascii) is much more compact than base 10 numbers.
As an aside, I’ve noticed that sometimes you can edit, or at least delete, offending node through the hypergraph - where they might otherwise fail using standard commands.
Sometimes i feel like a garbage man, cleaning up after the mess animators make.
We had a nice one today again, taking the attention of 2 TDs for an entire morning. After much reference cleaning and digging through the node connections, our conclusion was that the animator apparently had tried to constrain an object to a character rig without asking, he probably tried to constrain the object to some joint or locator that seemed to be in the right spot for his purpose and whenever it didn’t seem to work, he would simply delete the constraint rather than undo-ing his actions (leaving a scene riddled with half connected constraints and joints with wrong initial values), hilarity and much swearing ensued.