It (.ma) was probably the only thing I missed from Maya when I transitioned back to XSI. Well, that and NURBS modeling.
I should add, if folks get into a habit of using this practice to hack data into and out of Maya, one of the best and cleanest ways to start is to use Maya ASCII with the Export and Import commands. 1. It will reduce the .ma file to only the things relevant that you choose to export/import. 2. It will ignore a significant amount of the interface setup in both directions 3. Exports are automatically formatted to be “imported” 4. The redaction will make the MEL data easier to understand and more specific to your stated goal. In general, once you get used to it and know what to ignore or be aware of you can manually generate .ma files to import data into existing scenes or use the exports to decipher the scene/graph structure. If you are curious how this works, create a simple primitive and export it as .ma. Then interrogate the file with a text editor. It will give a sense of how a lot of the scene graph connections are structured but without the extraneous scene setup data. Be warned however, never hack or manually create an importable .ma without testing it on a dummy scene. A bad custom connectAttr command can blow Maya up faster than the speed of light. Oh, the fun we used to have back in the day…. -- Joey Ponthieux LaRC Information Technology Enhanced Services (LITES II) Science Systems and Applications Inc. (SSAI) NASA Langley Research Center __________________________________________________ Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and do not represent the opinions of NASA or any other party. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Rob Wuijster Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2016 1:46 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: So.. Maya rigging is still a thing... "Haven’t had a need to hack a .ma file in a really long time. But I’m sure there are still folks out there relying on it." Oh definitely! Using (and hacking) .ma files is still very useful when dealing with multiple external sources. e.g. reference files, textures, plugins etc. It's easy to clean out certain parts of the file header, so you can have Maya open a scene without throwing a ton of errors and go 'belly up' because something "important" is missing. Other than that, I do miss working in Softimage.... :-( Rob \/-------------\/----------------\/ On 26-1-2016 18:25, Ponthieux, Joseph G. (LARC-E1A)[LITES II] wrote: Haven’t had a need to hack a .ma file in a really long time. But I’m sure there are still folks out there relying on it.
