Timeline in scene now empty...

Unity Engine
1

Hi all, we have a scene file with two timelines, we intermittently update them and save the scene file.
Twice in the past two weeks one of my playable directors used by one of my Timeline’s has become empty.

Is there something we should know about multiple timelines in a scene that can causes this issue (or a thread that covers this or similar topics I may have missed)?

This could cause significant issues…

Thank you,

Eric Hance
MuseVFX

2

What do you mean by empty? Does the playable director lose the link to the timeline asset? Or are there no tracks in the timeline asset?

3

Good questions, the playable dir loses it’s link and the .playable file goes from ~40KB to 1KB. and won’t let the director link to it. The file .playable file only contains this:

%YAML 1.1
%TAG !u! tag:unity3d.com,2011:

Eric Hance
MuseVFX

4

That is very odd, and something I haven’t seen before. In particular, the playable file normally contains multiple assets, so even if the timeline asset was removed, I’d expect other things to be there (like animation clips, tracks and playable assets).
Are there any errors in the console when this happens?

Some thoughts of the top of my head that could be causing it are:

  • Are you ever deleting a timeline asset through script, even in playmode?
  • Do you use source control that uses readonly files, like perforce?
  • Do you use any custom tracks?
  • Are there any files with the same name in that directory?

I’m grasping at straws, but those are the leads that I can think of.

5

Hi Sean, thank you for the follow-up. I’m afraid the answer is no to each of those.

It was a very simple playable containing activation tracks (playback particle systems) and animation tracks (FBX cameras and characters).

We managed to retrieve the playable by going back several days, would the original and “damaged” file be of any use for diagnostics?

Eric Hance
MuseVFX

6

Ok i find te problem, you just need to find the window with a square in timeline tab press and find your object with timeline.