Removing Proxy Reference using Reference Editor

juliusz.kaczmarek — Thu, 03 May 2018 10:58:56 GMT

Hi,

I just want to report something that I consider a bug - hope that's the right place to do it. If not - please point me to one.

Basically I noticed, that when you use Proxy References in your scene and you do 'Remove Reference', only the original reference file gets removed. The Proxy Manager and Reference nodes representing other proxies still stay in the scene. This is causing major issues, as people are not aware of this. We have a tool that manages reference proxies in our scenes and it gets confused by those leftovers, giving unpredictable results etc...

The way to reproduce it:

You can use the scene attached - it's as simple as it can:

1) open Proxy_RefTEST - it has a reference to Sphere_RefTEST and a proxy - Cube_RefTEST

2) In Script Editor type in:

print pm.ls(typ="reference")
print pm.ls(typ="proxyManager")

Result:

[nt.Reference(u'Sphere_RefTESTRN'), nt.Reference(u'Sphere_RefTESTSphere_RefTESTPM1RN'), nt.Reference(u'sharedReferenceNode')]
[nt.ProxyManager(u'Sphere_RefTESTPM')]

2) In Reference Editor do 'Remove Reference' - either using the '-' button in the toolbar, or using Right-Click command Reference \ Remove Reference

3) In the script editor type in the same:

print pm.ls(typ="reference")
print pm.ls(typ="proxyManager")

Result:

[nt.Reference(u'Sphere_RefTESTSphere_RefTESTPM1RN'), nt.Reference(u'sharedReferenceNode')]
[nt.ProxyManager(u'Sphere_RefTESTPM')]

As you can see - only one reference file had been removed. The other stay and pollute the scene.

The reason they're invisible in the Reference Editor is the connection in ProxyManager - Active Proxy pointing to a non-existing reference node. If you manually re-connect it to the other existing reference file and restart Reference Editor, it will appear again (as unloaded reference).

I know there are tools to remove proxies one by one and this gives a clean result, but this is not what people intuitively do.

'Removing Reference' command should remove all the proxies and proxyManager as well as the original reference file.

I tested this on Maya 2016 and 2017

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Removing Proxy Reference using Reference Editor