How to save your project when Maya is stuck, solution from a programmer
Hello artists!
Nerd programmer here! :)
A person close to me is a 3d artist who uses Maya everyday. Few months ago she needed some help from me: Maya totally frozen, auto-save disabled and she was going to waste 2/3 hours of work. So she asked me if I could use some programming magic to help recover the project.
And, well, I did it and I want to share with you the solution, so maybe can help other artists out there.
As you know, if Maya crashes by its own, there is a window that appears (called "Crash Handler"), which informs you that the program is crashed and your project is saved into %TEMP (at least this is what happens on Windows). Instead, if Maya hangs, you have to close it manually from the Task Manager and lose your work.
OK, can we make it crash when its frozen so that the work is saved into %TEMP% ? Yes.
On Mac/Linux it just take a command from the terminal, but she uses Windows, where is way more difficult and requires interacting with the Windows API. So, at the time I got asked this, I wrote a super hackish program in 30min and solved the problem. Then I improved it in the days later and released it free and opensource on my GitHub.
It's tested on Maya 2019 but theoretically can work with any Maya outside.
Hope this can help you! Let me know what do you think!
Here are some links:
- Project home: https://github.com/carpikes/MayaCrasher (README and source code)
- Download page: https://github.com/carpikes/MayaCrasher/releases/tag/v1.0 (click on
MayaCrasher.zipto download the executable for Windows) - Blog post where I describe how it works internally: https://blog.the.al/2023/01/07/crash-maya-to-save-your-project.html
Cheers!
(Not sure about the flair of the post, is General OK?)