Part of mesh vanished in Maya upon opening saved file

ToffeeApple

Hi all

A bit of a New Year's disaster - I opened my saved Maya file and part of my mesh has vanished. I can tell it is still there as I can see it in the Hypergraph - also if you right click on the layers and hit select all - it appears to select (you can't see a wireframe but the widgets can be moved.) The file opens with an error - 'can't perform polysplit38'. Can anyone help?

The mesh I can't see is on the visible layers - flowers, blade, handle and leaf.

You can take a look at my Maya file here:

http://www.hyperfileshare.com/d/1625f7e5

Thanks in advance!

Bartalon

I hate to say this but you may have lost these mesh objects. One thing is for certain though, you need to get into the habit of deleting your construction history when you work (Edit > Delete All by Type > History). This is most likely the cause of your problem. I would recommend adding Delete History as a shelf button or better yet, as a hotkey (I use alt + d).

To add a menu item as a shelf button, hold Ctrl + Shift and click with the middle mouse button. A shortcut icon will appear in the active shelf.

In 99.9% of cases, you should delete history on your resulting models immediately after the use of Combine, Separate, or Extract. Your models have been separated, extracted, and recombined so much it's a miracle Maya doesn't crash the instant you try to open the file.

I'll poke around your file a bit more but consider that content lost at this point...

ToffeeApple

Thanks Bartalon - yes I realise I should have deleted history (and also a backup would have been good) - I normally do but was being far too carefree - I hope I have learnt a lesson if nothing else! I will add this as a menu item - thanks for taking a look.

ToffeeApple

Bartalon - don't worry about looking at my file some more as I spent a good part of today remaking it.

Denny

I would recommend you activate incremental save. This way Maya creates a new copy of your scene every time you press ctrl+s and stores it in a folder called incrementalSaves.

Go to File > Save (click option box) > Activate incremental save + unlimited