mb files from maya 8 in maya 7?
 

Is there a way to open scene files made in maya 8 in maya 7?
I did a lot of work in maya 8 but I find the extrude manipulator bug to be such an annoyance I decided to go back to maya 7, my scene files can not be opened in maya 7, so I'm basically asking for a workaround for this problem. (I don't want to lose any information that's present in the maya 8 scene files)

MB files are binary files written so only Maya 8 files can be opened in Maya 8. However Maya 7 files can be opened in Maya 8, but once saved the MB file will change and will only be usable for Maya 8.

MA Files are ASCII based and are written in plain text. This can be amended in any text editor and all references to Maya 8 can be changed to 7 or 6.5 etc...

Saying that, if your scene has something in it that is only available in Maya 8 then you may experience issues due to that feature not being available in 7 or 6.5 or 6 or 5 or 4 etc... I would recommend only using one or the other and not switching between the different versions.

hmmmm, another Maya 8 problem, i haven't hit the extrude problem yet,

the new logo as it boots up looks good though :)

seems as said, one must use both Maya 7 and 8 unless you know how to change the file..

err?? how do you do that? in text? do you just change the references to Maya 8?? is it that simple? like put 7 instead of 8?

this happened from 6.5 to 7 but there was a work around.

oke thanx very much :)

the reason i wanted to switch is the extrude tool manipulator bug in maya 8, wanted to continue working in maya 7 cause I find this bug really annoying, but I guess I'll have to finish the project in maya 8 then.

your help is greatly appreciated, thanks again!

The extrusion manipulator doesn's stay on the selected object when you click the "wold mode" icon on it. It jumps back to somewhere near the original objects pivot area.
Really annoying "feature".
Otherwise I really like the new version.

take a look at this, it appears they have a fix for the extrude face tool if you don't want to ditch maya 8 just yet...

http://forum.simplymaya.com/showthre...threadid=23208

Thank you very much for the info NeoStrider :)
I have not had time to look it up in the alias community faq´s.

You just made my day mate :D

Basically if you use ma files to save with open the file in wordpad/notepad or I would recommend editplus (free). Change the reerences in the file header from Maya 8 to Maya 7.

Here is the header of a Maya 7 File and the scenes requirements:

//Maya ASCII 7.0 scene
//Name: Final_commercial_6.ma
//Last modified: Thu, Sep 14, 2006 08:39:33 PM
requires maya "7.0";
requires "TurtleForMaya70" "3.0.0.5";
requires "Mayatomr" "7.0.1.14m - 3.4.5.2 ";
requires "finalRender" "1.0";
currentUnit -l centimeter -a degree -t film;
fileInfo "application" "maya";
fileInfo "product" "Maya Unlimited 7.0";
fileInfo "version" "7.0.1";
fileInfo "cutIdentifier" "200511200915-660870";
fileInfo "osv" "Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Build 2600)\n";

Change the 1st line to read Maya ASCII *.* scene
Change the 4th line to read requires maya "*.*";
Change the 10th line to read fileInfo "product" "Maya Unlimited *.*";
Change the 11th line to read fileInfo "version" "*.*.*";

Where *.* is your version of maya. This has worked for Maya versions 4 above, but I am unaware of any issues with doing this with Maya 7 to 8.

How wants to try... :attn:

sorry to not be clear, I meant from 8 down to 7 rather than the other way, one may ask why, well as i said, i had trouble rendering sprites until i found out t is not possible in any version of Maya using software renderer and the only way was using a hardware renderer?? too many tuts and not enough experience!!

i took off Maya 8 but have been think ing of using it again, not really sure why, i think Maya 4.5 would be enough for me but..??

I think the problem i had with the view port high render was it was permanently on?? Even in texture mode (6) with no lighting I had lighting (Maya 8) and shadows so i THINK somehow high quality render was always on, though the machine didn't get too chunky?? I don't know its a huge program and i figure somewhere around the year 2009 i might have a descent grasp of it.
thanks for the answer