Help on a Maya File

[A.J. Chua]

I have a model in maya which is a project for a class in AICASF, it's in maya 2009 and just few hours ago i was working on my model then saved it, then after few hours i went to a diffrent room where there's no class and tried opening to work on it again. unfortunately when i open it, it hangs at 37% and freezes. It wont open on 2008 either and i tried to copy it and make a back up of it, i edited the copied file to the word pad and edited the very bottom which has weird fonts that looks like squares, i erased all of them and tried opening it again. when i opened it, it loaded fully but my model wasn't there, it's missing, invincible, i dont know how to make it visible, i have no layers for it and now im clueless, if you want my maya file, send me your email: then i'll send it to you.

This happened to me before, from a gun model.

Please Help!

[rburke]

hate to tell you this but its gone. I lost a model the other day for the same reason. Maya 2009 is a bit more prone to this from what i can see so far.

First thing i always do when i remember is to save my file then to save my file again to a diff location. That way if its a hardrive corruption issue you can narrow it down to that. If its just a maya issue then again jsut save every 5 minutes. This is one of the most awful things that happens on a regular basis. Also sometimes if you history is getting very full this will happen so delete history before you save out. Another precaution i take sometimes on certain scenes is to export my objects to obj and then import back into maya and make a new scene with them. This gets rid off all the maya crap thats attached to your scene, giving you a nice fresh start.

But other than that your file is corrupted and youll need to start over. sorry.

[Fingus]

Two tips to help you avoid stuff like this again:

Save as Maya Ascii
Maya Binary (.mb) is a compiled format, or whatever the technical term is, meaning that it is packaged and compressed when you save. As a result the files take less space, but at the same time there is a slight chance that it can screw up. Maya Ascii (.ma) on the other hand is essentially a dump of your entire history (even if you have deleted it) in MEL format. You can actually open up your .ma files in Notepad and change around on stuff like the scale of your models and such. Anyway, it will take up a little more space (which is only a couple of kB anyway) but will be much safer since you don't need to compile the file when you save.

Use Incremental Saves
I can never stress this enough. If you go into the Option Box next to Save you can check off the option to use Incremental Saves. This will create a new folder called incrementalSave in the same folder where you have your scene file. In this folder Maya will create a new backup file each time you save. You can set a maximum amount of files it will save to before it starts overwriting the oldest in the options as well, but as I mentioned above the scene files are teensy weensy.
If you use incremental saves you will never lose another scene to file corruption ever again, and you will have an archive of your progress which is really handy for a number of reasons.

And of course it is also recommended to always back up your files in case of hardware failure. But you knew that already.

[ToykoF]

I did try to save it in ma file format too. Then I open the ma file and rename the version from 2009 to 2008.
but it didn't work :P
I don;t know is it just me or not.
My solution so far is after you done, export it to an obj file.
:(

[rburke]

something you can do now is go to the open options box and check the ignore maya version option. then you can open maya files off different versions without having to modify the file itself.