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Autodesk Maya tips: How To Open Maya 2013 Scene File in Older Versions

Maya 2013 files adds a -ch flag to the ASCII file to speed up file open on large scenes. For that reason older versions of Maya doesn’t recognize it. To solve this edit your .ma file in text editor and search/replace for the string -ch. With that flag removed you should be able to load the file in older versions.

Credit to this post because this were I got the procedures I just made a video of it.

Though the string codes he use to search and replace wasn’t working on notepad++
So I made up my own codes.

here is the code to search and delete:

-ch ([0-9]+)

——find in notepad++

Thank You.

STEP BY STEP PROCEDURES:

Make sure to save your scene to maya ASCII file.

1. So open your text editor(Notepad++) and the go to find.

2. Search in -ch and you will see it is being highlighted in your text editor

3.-ch is the code you need to delete and the numbers beside it.

4. to do that you just need to type in this code -ch ([0-9]+)

5.make sure to enable regular expressions

6.and then go to tab mark all
(to mark everything with -ch and numbers)

7.Then go to replace, replace it with a blank page
and then replace all

After that save it and your done!

—–Opening the scene to older maya versions.

Don’t forget to check ignore versions first and then open your Maya ASCII file.

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