What nodes are safe to delete?

[Moustache_Animation]

Hi everyone, I am having a very situation right now where a whole bunch of mGear files systematically hard crash Maya with no error message as soon as I open them so I went back several saves back and I am trying to clean up my scene manually but I have no clue which nodes are safe to delete.

Should I be deleting anything from the following screenshots or is everything required by my guides?

Thanks

[chrislesage]

1. Do you use proxy attributes in your rig? (tl;dr: don’t!)
2. If removing proxy attributes doesn’t work, you said you were using Maya 2019. This version was trash in my experience. I recommend testing in 2020.4 to see if it opens, just to isolate if it is a 2019 problem or not.)
3. Have you seen this thread? Maya 2020.2 crash when opening rig

And especially if both #1 and #2, I seem to remember there was specifically a bug in Maya 2019 related to proxy attributes. So you can either try building without them, or upgrade Maya. In either case, I highly recommend removing proxy attributes. They also mess up the graph editor.

The only benefit to proxy attributes is a slight convenience of having attributes like the ik/fk switch on multiple controls.

---

(While taking that above screenshot, I was horrified to learn I had accidentally been building my rigs with proxy attributes on a current project.)

[chrislesage]

Or this thread is another good thing to check, but it also looks related to proxy attributes in the end: Running into odd crash when trying to load a built rig