Our animation rig broke mid-project last Tuesday and I had to rebuild it from scratch

I was rendering a 30 second commercial for a local car dealership when our character rig started popping joints on frame 247. Turns out a constraint group had been corrupted from an old import and I had to redo all the weight paints. Has anyone else had a rig fail at the worst possible time and what backup system do you use now?

3 comments

3 Comments

amy_reed793d ago

Flush all your prefs and rebuild your rig from scratch every three months whether it needs it or not. I lost a whole character's face controls once (talk about panic) so now I save out a clean base rig file with everything constrained and weighted correctly. That way when something goes sideways I just import the broken geo into the clean file and re-skin it. Takes like an hour vs. two days of redoing everything.

veraramirez2d ago

Rebuilding on a clean base rig every three months sounds like doing your oil change by swapping the whole engine just to be safe. The trick is actually keeping your incremental saves so you can step backwards instead of nuking the entire thing. Each version only takes a few seconds to label and it saves you from having to redo work that was perfectly fine.

quinn_kim451d ago

Does anyone else back up the actual pref files instead of scrubbing them? I keep a dated copy of my Maya prefs folder from right after a clean install, so if something gets corrupted I just drop that in and it resets all the hotkeys and shelves without losing my personal settings. The trick is knowing which files hold your saved layouts versus the ones that corrupt everything. I also toss the prefs folder into my Google Drive folder so I can grab the clean copy from any machine if Im working at a different station. Saves me from the rebuild dance entirely.