Skin unbinds when changing machine

[Anonymous]

Hey all,

I've reached the rendering phase of a project after working on it from my home PC. I've been using Maya 2022, but the university PCs I'd use for rendering run Maya 2020. The rig was animated with HumanIK, applying mocap data along with having a face rig. This works fine in Maya 2022, but when I import the scene to Maya 2020, this happens:

The skin looks unbound, but when you use Paint Skin Weights, the skin is still bound, but all weights are removed. I do have ngSkinTools installed on my home PC (not university PCs), but didn't use it for this and tried deleting custom nodes as a precaution. I can't attach a scene file due to it exceeding 71mb sadly.Any ideas on how to fix this?

[mspeer]

Hi!

ZIP the file to get a smaller file size.

[Anonymous]

Good idea! Here's the file, I've removed most of the geometry to get it down to size, but this should still show the issue.

[zewt · Accepted solution]

If you need your scenes to work in 2020 then you should probably work in that version to begin with, since scenes from newer versions aren't guaranteed to work in older ones.  It's possible to work in a newer version and load in an older one, but if you aren't familiar with the compatibility issues it's safer to work with the target version.

This is probably caused by component tags, which is a 2022 deformer feature that isn't compatible with older versions.  In preferences, you can disable "Settings > Animation > Use component tags for deformation component subsets", which will create deformers that are more backwards-compatible with 2020.  This will also disable a bunch of powerful new rigging features in 2022, but you're probably not using those yet.

That won't fix your existing scene, though.  The easiest way to do that is probably to duplicate the mesh and copy the skin binding across.  You can also install Maya 2020 on your system side by side with Maya 2022.  That way you can go back and forth easily to see if your scene is working.