As long as we know Maya, we know it can crash for many different reasons. There's no simple method to find the culprit, but the best way is to find a reliable reproducible pattern to the issue, that can be reproduced on my end.


What if the issue appears to be random?


In this case, we can try eliminating possibilities. Please follow the steps in the order below:


  1. If the issue started after a certain animBot update, please visit animbot.ca/versions, install an older version and see if the issue still happens. If yes, proceed with the below steps.
  2. Turn OFF animBot autoBots. This disable all animBot's callbacks, which basically means nothing will be running in the background and if the issue occurs, it will happen only when actually clicking/using an animBot tool explicitly.
  3. If the issue still seems to happen randomly, uninstall animBot and restart Maya or simply restart Maya and don't load animBot. If the issue still occurs, it means it's not related to animBot. In this case you might need to check your rigs or other tools if you are using any.
  4. If the issue happens, at this point you should be able to find a reproducible pattern. Please send the following to alan@animbot.ca:
    1. Maya version
    2. Operational System (Win, Mac or Linux)
    3. Animbot version
    4. Screenshots or video recording of the steps taken, from Maya launch up to the error
    5. If possible, a maya file that this can be reproduced


Please keep in mind


Although an issue may occur while using animBot or any other tool or script, in many cases the culprit is not the action of the tool itself. Many times it lies on how Maya internally deals with the evaluation of the nodes after a certain action. For example, Maya may crash if intertwined attributes are manipulated at the same time, at several times within a short interval, or if there's some sort of cycle evaluation happening in the rig. Other cases may involve zero division, mesh evaluation crashes, infinite evaluation loops and the list goes on and on. In all those cases, animBot itself is not the actual root of issue, even though it happen while using an animBot tool. For example, the rig might work just fine while manipulating anim curves natively, but it may crash while using animBot's sliders because the user can easily manipulate thousands of anim curves at once with them.