Anyone got any voodoo for recovering corrupted data in Maya?

Steve Schulze

Well this sucks.

I've been working on my Unearthly Challenge entry. Finished the high poly mesh of one of the major components completely, had it looking really nice, and was about to start building the low poly. I saved the file, rotated the scene a little and Maya crashed back to the desktop. No big deal I thought, but on reopening the file, my mesh is gone. There aren't any autobackups. There are still a couple of components in the file, but most of it seems to have just been deleted, or rather anything visible and selectable has been.
I expect this is a long shot, but is there anything I can try to recover what I've lost short of developing some form of time travel?

pyromania

Have you checked the Temp dir to see if Maya wrote a backup during the crash? Its usually in C:\Documents and Settings\(your username)\Local Settings\Temp

You could try exporting the scene out as Maya ASCII or OBJ and re-import. I've fixed broken meshes that way, maybe it will work with broken scenes.

Steve Schulze

You sir, are awesome. Re-importing an ASCII file has recovered my missing objects.

I owe you a beer.

EDIT: And now its gone again. Repeating the steps don't seem to recover it. I either get an empty scene, a scene missing the majority of the geometry or mostly Maya just crashes.

Thanks for trying mate, I think it's gone for good. I guess I'll just drown my sorrows and then start again.

MoP

Do you save your scenes as .MB or .MA?
I've learned that .MA tends to be the safest choice - that way, if a file refuses to open or crashes on load, you can at least attempt to debug it (launch Maya with script editor set to show all code, then load the file and see if anything shows up as failing to evaluate - it's usually modelling construction history which causes this sort of stuff in my experience).

Then you have a chance of finding the problem lines in the .ma file, commenting it out, and trying to load again.

Also if you check Highend3d, there's at least 2-3 different choices for "autoback" scripts which will create functionality similar to Max's autoback. I keep meaning to write one myself.

dejawolf

does maya have an import into scene feature like max?
you could try importing the corrupt scene into a new scene.

SHEPEIRO

yes its called import ;-)

i use Tj incremental saving, and save alot, you just need to remember to clean out your Mbs everyonce in a while when your puter grinds to a halt cos its filled your HD

if you can get it back export as an obj just to make sure its all cleaned out

AnimeAngel

If you manage to get it back, it would prolly be wise to clear all the history for all the pieces. The error maybe stored somewhere in the history. Do that and then save under a new name as an ma

dejawolf

SHEPEIRO wrote: »

yes its called import ;-)

i use Tj incremental saving, and save alot, you just need to remember to clean out your Mbs everyonce in a while when your puter grinds to a halt cos its filled your HD

if you can get it back export as an obj just to make sure its all cleaned out

right. in max you have xref, merge, and import.
i was thinking of the Xref and merge function.

pliang

'Optimize scene size' under "File" would also help clean up any junk data that would otherwise fubar the file.

.Ma has been pretty good to me, I've been using that format for a long time now.

Steve Schulze

Well, I dunno.
The object still appears to exist in the Maya scene, it's just invisible, unselectable and unusable for all intents and purposes. I've done some playing around with the MA file, trying to splice the vertex information into a functioning node and whatnot, but it still doesn't appear.

Szark

Have you tried exporting out as an obj and importing that back into Maya?

Or, exporting & importing an obj into another application?

Just a thought...

Steve Schulze

I swear Maya isn't so much a program as a sadistic AI that just wants to fuck with my head. I went out to get some lunch, came home and suddenly everything is working again in the original file without anything having been modified. I've been able to export, save and modify the mesh with nary a crash.

What. The. Hell.

I'm upgrading my opinion of the program from harsh mistress to psycho bitch. Give it another ten minutes and I'll probably lose the mesh again.

I don't think I can deal with this

metalbonsai

Try this on...

Open the .ma/.mb in wordpad and doing a ‘find & replace’ on the value below.


Find: #QNAN
Replace with: 0 (that’s a zero)

then...



Save as .ma/.mb

I can’t guarantee that this will work, but it worked for me twice in two times this has happened to me. Maya (or a goblin :poly122:) corrupts vertex data and maya then only reads up until it can't understand anymore and dumps the rest (seemingly).


Good Luck,


-Metal