TheBeals

Maya Ascii

I posted about this topic earlier, but I felt a real world example would be beneficial to everyone. In an earlier post, I had said that if you saved an .ma and your project crashed or you couldn’t open it for some reason, you could go through that file in a text editor and find the problem. I just lived through this hellish problem. I had been working on my shoe and saving and iterating as normal and then I tried to merge vertex and it fatal errored. When I tried opening the last file I had saved, I found out that it had been corrupted and could not open. Since it was an .mb I was out of luck and my last iteration saved was 2 hours prior, which really isn’t too bad. Fortunately Maya successfully saved an .ma in temp when it crashed.

This .ma was almost 400 megs and it was too big to open for notepad, but astonishingly wordpad was able to open it (doh!). This file was over 500,000 lines long, so long that wordpad had to open it in sections and ended up taking about 20 minutes to fully open. Generally an .ma is structured in this way:

Basic File Info (name, date etc…)

Camera nodes and tranformations

Other node information (creation, transformation)

Lights

Layers

Histories of objects

Animation Histories

ConnectAttrb of lights/shaders/materials

Now granted this information could be off and should taken with a grain of salt, but GENERALLY this is the order.

Since I knew what killed it (MergeVertex), and where it was located, I scrolled down near to the bottom and searched for “MergeVertex”. I found it and deleted it then saved but it still didn’t open. So I figured it had to be linked to its history so I deleted the entire history of the object and all of its connections (basically the entire last bit of the .ma). Be very careful when you do this and make sure the structure stays in tact and semi colons and such remain in the right places.

After this I was then able to open it up. Everything was in Chaos-all my display layers were deleted, things were misnamed-utter chaos and of course no materials existed on the objects. But this was fine, since I had prior working scenes and I just needed to export and import the object that I had been in the middle of working on when Maya died.

So in Conclusion, make sure you save an .ma at least once per work session and if you do need to root through one, especially if it was as big and scary as mine, do it smartly. Know what you are looking for and where it is located. If you are not sure what caused it, it usually is one of the last things you tried to do.

Also, a lot of times fatal errors can be caused by conflicting preferences so move your preferences and try and opening the file first and see if it does it, if not move your preferences back and start rooting away!