Import/referencing animation causes Arnold lights to not work

[hkeise20]

Hi!

I'm having an extremely irritating issue that for the life of me, I can't figure out. I am trying to create a render file with my environment and my animation referenced in. When I reference in the environment, everything is fine. As soon as I reference in the animation, I get the dreaded "errors have occurred while reading this scene that may result in data loss". I really don't get what's going on in the script editor when I check it.And then as soon as I open Renderview, about 50% of my area lights don't work. They're in the outliner, they just don't show up when I try to render.

I tried importing the animation, starting with the lit environment file and importing/referencing the animation from there, starting with the anim file and doing the opposite, and rendering the current frame. The same problem happens every time. The render is entirely unusable, you can't even see the animation.

The rig I'm using is Kyle by Josh Sobel, if that helps. And I already changed all the materials on the rig to AI.

I attached a renderview photo of what it looks like with and without the animation. All the mesh lights work, and some of the area lights. All the small ones basically. (Oh and I know the dome light needs an HDRI, that's next on my list)