Maya Corrupt Files! HELP!

[sonymng420]

Hi everyone, I have a SERIOUS prob here that hopefully someone can shed some light on:

I have a scene file that I am animating, and when I save it, it saves fine (or so it tells me), and the file size is right where it needs to be. However, whenever I open this scene file, it is terribly corrupt. The joints of my character are gone completely, all animation curves and keyframes are gone, the Character's geometry is distorted across the scene with bizarre transforms and fractures, and all of my display layers have gone missing.

Now, typically I can debug a problem through the Ascii, but the Script Editor doesn't give me a single error! As far as Maya thinks, the scene is fine and dandy!

So I go back a few saves and open the last working file. I change NOTHING, and just save it as a new name. Boom, corrupt, just like that. And I didn't change anything in the scene to make it corrupt.

The character is not referenced. I am not using particles, but I am using cloth and jiggle.

WHY ISNT MAYA GIVING ME ERRORS?!?!?!

Please, if anybody has any ideas what could be the source of these problems, I could start going through the Ascii files and try and fix them, but I can't until I know what I am looking for.

Thanks!

[gmask]

Sorry if these sound like stupid questions but...

How large is the file? How much memory do you have? What version of Maya? What OS? Is you system running out of memory? Did you restart the system and Maya? What was the last thing you did before this started to happen?

It does sound liek soemthing I have had happen with referenced files but you say that there ar eno references so..

If nothing else try importing the scene into a new scene file.. this often will fix problems like this.

[sonymng420]

Here's the stats:

Maya 4.0
40 Meg file
1.5 GB RAM
Dual Ghz PIII CPU
W2K

Memory usage is at tolerant levels, with about 800Megs free RAM. System has been restarted multiple times.

I DID have references in the file, but they have since been removed. Could it be an artifact from previous referencing?

I tried importing it, but with similar errors.

Any thoughts?

[movieist]

"However, whenever I open this scene file, it is terribly corrupt. The joints of my character are gone completely, all animation curves and keyframes are gone, the Character's geometry is distorted across the scene with bizarre transforms and fractures, and all of my display layers have gone missing. "

This sounds almost EXACTLY like the problem I had a few months ago with maya 4. Luckily I save tons of files along the way so I was able to recover a non corrupted version that only left me with about 2 hours of wasted work. There seems to be some file corruption problems with 4.0 that were supposedly solved in the patch they released. Instead of taking a chance with a patch I now save ALL of my maya scene files in ASCII (.ma) format. The maya binary format is way too risky for me in version 4.0. Ever since I switched to .ma format only, I still get error messages every now and then but have yet to see any glitches with my models or animation. And I've been spending a ton of time modeling, animating for my demo reel since that change so I'm confident with staying with .ma for the time being. Yeah the file size is a little bigger but it's worth it!!

Back to the problem at hand, I tried editing the corrupted .mb files with a text editor but my intentions proved futile. There was no progress made whatsoever doing that. Maybe somebody more experienced with editing code could have fixed it. My advice to you..... if you can't fix your corrupted file..revert back to an older version and start saving in .ma format! good luck!

[sookeyjane]

i had very similar problems with maya 4, and never found a way to handle the corrupted files. but i had some luck with going back to the earlier versions that still opened correctly, and then saving not as .mb, but as .ma. they seemed to be more stable for some reason.

it's worth a shot.

[sonymng420]

Alright, I finally figured it out: Turns out that Maya generates a MASSIVE filename for the Jiggle Cache, and when it goes past a certain size limit, it causes a buffer overflow in Maya, causing files to open corrupted. Alias has released 4.0.2 of Maya, which corrects for this exact problem, among a few others. So if you have jiggle and are experiencing similar problems go get this patch!

I opened the "corrupt" files in 4.0.2, and they worked great. Thanks for everyone's suggesstions though, they led me down the right path!

[movieist]

OMG!!! I read about the jiggle overflow problem but I had no idea it was severe enough to corrupt the entire file like that!!! Guess I better update maya and go check those so called "corrupted" files. --evil, evil jiggle...damn that thing! Oh yeah, I'm still going to stick with .ma instead of .mb. Paranoia is a powerful thing ya know...