Submodels - Inconsistent behaviour

I am experiencing inconsitent behaviour with submodels. The aircraft has been exported in the following pieces:

  • Base aircraft
  • Cargopod
  • Propeller

I also have two submodels for dirt, one for the cargopod variant and one for the no cargopod variant. Each dirt submodel uses unique materials, node and animation names as per the submodel merging documentation. Only the root node of the model is common and that is not animated.

When testing the aircraft in devmode and Community folder, the plane will load up just fine. Cargopod and non-cargopod variants show up OK most of the time. Sometimes, however, when switching between cargopod and non-cargopod liveries the aircraft will break. An example, if I was in a non-cargopod version and switch to a cargopod one and then it breaks, the exterior of the CP version won’t show up. The non-CP exterior will be fine and load consistently. One click ago everything was OK though.

The error I’m getting in the console is that the animations are used on shared nodes, which is not true, as it was already separated in 3ds max.

What could the problem be? I am using a similar approach for the cockpit, but over there things work without issue.

P.S. If needed I can provide a package to look into it.