Rig only deforms when scrubbing through time

[Anonymous]

I'm having an odd problem where my rig's mesh does not deform when playing the scene normally but deforms when scrubbing through the timeline and viewing a single frame. Previously the mesh was deforming fine, and previous versions of the file deform fine as well.

The weird part is I have a version of the file where everything deforms just fine on playback, but when I change almost anything in the scene, the mesh stops deforming.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3rSrW_C9Os&feature=youtu.be

In this video I have a nCloth mesh, but as you can see at the end of the video the nCloth is working properly, it's just not deforming the mesh. (I'm using Make Bones Dynamic to drive a set of bones to act like cloth, and what's visible is the base mesh that should be deforming.)

I don't believe it has anything to do with the nCloth settings as the nCloth is working, it's just not deforming, plus I was also seeing this behavior happen with a skinCluster on the leg mesh I have there, which I've unskinned for now. When I would rotate a bone (display smoothness 1) the mesh would sometimes stop deforming unless I deformed another part of the rig, and I had to delete and recreate keyframes to get the mesh to deform again.

I've imported the reference into a different scene with other rigs and other rigs deform just fine, with the same behavior happening to just this rig. I've also reset Maya's preferences.

I have no idea what is causing this but it seems to relate to deformers in my scene. But I don't know enough about deformers to know. (edit: deformers as in skinclusters, ncloth, etc. I don't have actual deformers in my scene)

[sean.heasley · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous

I saw something like this before and it was linked to bad geometry.

Could you try exporting the cloth mesh as an obj, attach an ncloth to it in a bare scene and then see if it playsback?

The ideas behind this is that exporting as an obj will fix the errors and then it should play as expected.

Please let me know if anything changes!

[Anonymous]

Hi there, thanks for getting back to me quick. I think I got it working!

Since that cloth mesh is automatically created by Make Bones Dynamic, and I've already tried recreating it with the same results, my thinking then is there was something else in the scene with bad geometry. So I tried exporting each individual mesh in my scene as an obj, imported the obj into a bare scene, and deformed it with ncloth just to make sure it plays and deforms correctly. It all deformed fine.

I imported all the fresh OBJs into the original scene, copied the skin weights over and it all deforms again. Thank you! I will reply if it breaks again for some reason but I think replacing all the geometry with fresh OBJ files worked.

[sean.heasley]

Hi @Anonymous

Awesome glad it worked for you! And yeah please feel free to update here if it goes wrong again!