Maya Randomly screwing up-Deleting Mesh, Crashing

Tulkamir

Yea... I dunno what the friggen hell is wrong with my Maya, but this is the second time it's done this. Last night I saved a file, rebooted my comp, came back, and the main mesh of the file was mysteriously gone. I went back to an older save and redid most of it, but for no apparent reason it screwed up again.

Exactly what I was doing at the time: I had half my mesh deleted so I could mirror my geometry, was just working on half. Extruded some edges inwards for some windows, went to delete the faces along where the seam of the model was. Wouldn't let me delete the edges. So I figured... waht the hell, and started to merge the verts instead of deleting the polys. Then, to finish that I used slice edge to add polys where needed to merge in for a corner. Upon pressing enter with slice edge it gave me an error that it was an inncorrect polygonal object or some such thing. Then I tried to delete the poly's once more, instead my entire mesh was deleted. I hit undo around 4 times, mesh didn't come back, said there was nothing more to undo. Then Maya gave me a fatal error and crashed.

As far as I can tell my mesh is clean. I've been constantly checking over it to make sure that it is, though I could've missed something I suppose.

Cany anyone help? This project is due tomorrow. Last night I lost around 5 hours of work, now I just lost another hour or so. At this rate it's never gonna get done.

Sorry for the rant, and thanks to anyone who can help me with this...

-Mitch

Daz

I just answered your other thread. Do you have an .ma? Mail it to me If you do.

Tulkamir

It's currently saved as an .mb, but I can save as an .ma easily enough. Where would you like me to mail it to?

Thank you very much.

cholden

I've had some weird, seemingly random problems like this before. Exporting to OBJ then work off that sometimes fixes things. Hopefully Daz can help you out.

Daz

OK well first off, ALWAYS work with .ma where possible. A .ma can be opened and edited with a text editor, so there's hugely more chance of being able to salvage geometry than with a .mb.

As Chris says, try exporting to .obj, failing that mail it to me at d_pattenden@hotmail.com and I'll have a look.

Daz

oh and ALWAYS save multiple versions! Increment save helps a lot.

Tulkamir

Well, exporting to .obj didn't do much. Actually seemed to cause more problems, which I'm guessing is generally a bad sign.

Thanks for the idea though Cholden.

I'm gonna send ya an email now Daz. Thank you very much for all the help.

Tulkamir

ARGHHHH!!!

Well, I'm not sure if it was a problem with the email or you're just busy Daz, but yea, I redid it all already. Of course, it has screwed up yet again. My mesh went wonky, so i went back to one of my incremented saves, and now I get an error that says "Errors have occured while reading this scene that may result in data loss. Please check the script editor for details."

It does that with all of my incremented saves as well as the actual file, so basically I have to go back again.

It's getting annoying, this will be like time number 4 going over this part of the model.

Anyone know why I'm getting that error?

If it makes a difference I resaved to a .ma file, and it's only the .ma that give me the problem.

Thanks.

Daz

? Weird, I never got an e-mail from you. There is something nasty in that file. Or it's some kind of broken node connection or something. I would export as an obj into a clean file for starters.

Tulkamir

Blah, fartin mail servers. Ahh well.

Oh well, I'll try to do the export thing and cross my fingers.

If it screws up again I may be forced to throw my computer out my window. :P

Anyways, thanks for all the help, you've been awesome.

Tulkamir

Hmmm... when I do the export to .obj thing some of the model parts come out in black instead of the normal grey. I'm having some troubles getting my ref images appear because of this... is this a normal problem?

Thanks.

[edit]Not exactly a big thing, I can just duplicate the objects that are place and assign materials to them, I'm just kind of wondering if this is normal or if it could mean something is wrong?[/edit]

Daz

Well, it depends on what material they were before. The obj export should preserve the material If it had one assigned.

You can always try dpattenden@comcast.net

Tulkamir

Alright, thanks.

Sorry to bug more, but I did have to send another email. I have yet more problems.

Tell me if it reaches you.

Thank you!

Daz

OK data recovered. I sent you mail with everything, but I also wanted to throw this out there for the Maya gurus (where for art thou Whargoul?) since I myself don't fully understand it.
Something you are doing Maya doesn't like ( my only guess here is the really messy arrangement of stuff in the outliner could well have caused some funkiness ), and it is somehow losing a value and replacing it with #QNAN.



Now, I don't know what #QNAN is, but I have seen this happen before and would love to know more about what the heck is going on.
My fix is to hack the .ma, replace all instances of '#QNAN' with '0', save the file and it now opens. But I really don't know what is going on underneath the hood when Im doing this. So if anyone does I would love to know more. Im sure Tulkamir would too! :-)

Tulkamir

Hey, yea, I'd love to know all I could about what's been causing this. Other than my lack of organization. :S

In that vein... I just thought of something that could maybe cause it? I use the MJ Poly tools pluggin for Maya, mostly just so that I can use the connect too. (As well as select ring and select loop). Could that be the possible culprit?

Anyways, thanks again to Daz, and if anyone know more about this that'd be awesome!

Daz

ya know, I think you just might well have hit the nail on the head. Make sure you del history after using it and before any other action, see If that helps.

Just found a comment on cgtalk that mentions the bug: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=218401

Tulkamir

Alright, will do. Sort of sucks that that is likely the problem, the connect tool is so damn useful (and simple). I don't understand why it hasn't been added to Maya yet. Ahh well.

Thanks again, I'll hold off on using it as much as I can and will make sure to delete the history every time I do, see if that helps.

Daz

Reading more, Im not sure that it is. These make no mention of its use:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/search.php?searchid=3312439

"A #qnan is basically a number out of range, in my experiences, it means that a number is infinately small, so usually you can get away with replacing it with a 0."

Oh well, at least I know what the qnan actually means now! I can sleep!

Super

"I hit undo around 4 times, mesh didn't come back, said there was nothing more to undo."

Then when you hit re-do it says no more re-do, right? I've had this happen on 90% of my models and I have no friggin idea why! Annoying as hell, isn't it? I searched high and low and couldn't find any mention of the problem. Luckily I had incremental saves on (if you don't, do it).

Not sure if its directly related to MJPoly because I haven't used that since 6.0 as Maya 7 included similar tools and I still have this problem (only yesterday infact). I'm not entirely sure but maybe its something to do with crazyness in the outliner (nodes), usually my geometry has nodes all over the place from modelling poly by poly, adding smooth proxy, to duplicating instances but I'm not entirely sure. The "invalid polygonal object" is a familar message too. Clean this up as often as you can, but as you say, the problem is intermittent.

I'm definitely saving as .ma from now on like daz says though, in a hope that if anything does happen its salvageable.

Whargoul

Search and replace your text file, replace #QNAN with 0 and it should load up after that. QNAN is programmer geek for something like "Not A Number" - maybe out of range or infinity, etc.

thnom

God damn I love Wikipedia..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not-a-number

Quiet NaNs
Quiet NaNs, or qNaNs, do not raise any additional exceptions as they propagate through most operations. The exceptions are where the NaN cannot simply be passed through unchanged to the output, such as in format conversions or certain comparison operations (which do not "expect" a NaN input).