Maya format specification

Hello everyone,

I think this is the correct forum to ask this but please redirect me if I am wrong.
For my job, I will have to implement some simple maya export functions, nothing near a full fledged plugin, only very specific features but I would like it to create correct and compatible Maya ascii files. Is there somewhere a specification of the Maya Ascii format ? I had no luck searching it on the official website. How do you folks write the collada exporter plugin ? Do you guess the meaning of the fields from the (fairly self-explanatory) .ma file or do you have an official spec ?

Hi Yves, the MayaCollada plugin doesn’t work with the Maya ascii file format. Instead it directly accesses Maya’s internal data structures using Maya’s api and saves the model as a Collada document. If you can read/write Collada documents then you can communicate with Maya via Collada. That means you wouldn’t have to worry about Maya ascii files and would be able communicate with other tools that are compatible with Collada, e.g. Max, SoftImage, and Blender.