Broken references, revisited.

Today's episode of Maya=FAIL is brought to you by the number 8.

I was called over to a lighter's desk today. One of the assets in her shot refused to allow itself to be added to a render layer. Closer inspect revealed that it was somehow named wrong. This particular asset was part of a numbered series: asset1, asset2, asset3, etc.. In this particular case, asset8 was in the shot, but the namespace was called asset9.

What?

Nowhere in our workflow do we change the name of an asset. I tracked through all other assets that made up the scene, and found a few lingering nodes related to asset9, probably from nodes that were imported then removed or renamed. Thinking that somehow, they were responsible, I cleaned up the assets in question, rebuilt the lighting scene and... nope, still there.

Where was asset9 coming from? There was no longer any asset9 in ANY of the maya files that comprised the scene!

Maya's automatic naming clash handling was somehow kicking in, erroneously, and renaming asset8's namespace to asset9 on a few nodes. That was causing connections to fail (silently, of course) and weirdness to ensue..

The solution? In the lighting sync scene (which is then referenced into the lighter's scene) I changed the namespace from "asset8" to "asset8A".

And now the lighting scene works. Why? No idea.

Hey Autodesk, if ending a namespace in a number can cause mysterious node renaming when those assets are later referenced, WHY is it even possible to do so?

FAIL.